The board
- Pay
- $80K – $120K
- Where
- Alameda
- Posted
- Aug 16
We’re hiring a research associate to join Astera Neuro’s rodent neuroscience team. Your initial assignment is to run the surgery and behavior training that prepare animals for an all-optical program: reading, writing, and perturbing working memory in the mouse cortex. Chronic cranial-window and headbar implants are the core of the job from day one.
The ideal candidate is meticulous and fast with their hands, with experience performing cranial-window surgeries. You can implant a window in the morning, run a behavior-training session in the afternoon, and keep the colony and the rigs in order. A clear, long-lived window is what makes a write-in experiment possible, so surgical yield and preparation quality set the ceiling on what the team can attempt.
What you'd do
- Conviction that the brain’s internal model can be understood in full, and that getting there requires a kind of science no single academic lab can do; we’re betting on scale, deep collaboration, and open sharing of ideas in a full-stack environment.
- Willingness to be held to an engineering standard. In this role that standard lands on the preparation: we treat surgical yield and window quality as scientific results, not support work.
- Comfort building on shared infrastructure rather than private projects; rigs, surgical preparations, and records are standardized so they can be shared across the team.
- Care for the animals: healthy, well-handled, calm mice, supported by dedicated veterinary oversight, are the foundation of both the science and its credibility, independent of what regulation requires.
- Commitment to open science. We release tools, data, and methods, and aim to create a new dynamic of rapid, open exchange in neuroscience.
What they want
- BS or BA with 0-6+ years of experience in neuroscience, biology, bioengineering, or a related field, or equivalent hands-on experience. We value demonstrated skill and relevant experience above credentials.
- Current, hands-on experience performing mouse survival surgery: chronic cranial-window implantation and headbar installation, plus stereotaxic viral injections.
- This is the requirement that matters most: these are hard skills to learn, and we need them on day one.
- A track record of high surgical yield and healthy, long-lived window preparations.
- Meticulous, fast hands, and the ability to sustain high-quality work at volume.
About Astera · Neuro
Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. We believe the coming years will bring an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advancement as exponential progress in AI converges with central advances in other fields to accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive progress.