Experimental Systems — Analytical Chemistry

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Location: Cambridge, MA or London, UK
Position Type: Full-time

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About the Role(s)

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We are looking for one or more creative experimental systems engineers to help us build new ways of observing chemistry as it happens.

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Dayhoff Labs is developing AI and experimental platforms for understanding and engineering complex chemical and biochemical systems. A central part of this work is the ability to watch liquid-phase chemical reaction networks evolve in real time: mixtures of enzymatic and non-enzymatic chemistry, mostly in aqueous conditions, with flows of substrates, catalysts and products entering and leaving controlled reactor systems.

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Your experience could be in process chemistry, CSTRs or microfluidics, or on the analytic side with techniques including  Raman, MS or NMR, or it could be a hybrid. 

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These roles are for people who like building things and working things out. You will prototype experimental setups that combine pumps, valves, reactors, microfluidics, inline spectroscopy, electrochemical probes, autosampling, NMR, LC-MS, and Python-based data acquisition. The aim is not to make beautiful instruments on the first pass. The aim is to learn quickly which measurement architectures give us useful, trustworthy information about dynamic chemistry.

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You might build a small CSTR connected to Raman and pH probes one week, a segmented-flow assay with automated sampling the next, and a Python pipeline that aligns sensor traces, spectra and LC-MS data the week after.

 

What You’ll Do

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• Design and build prototype systems for monitoring aqueous chemical reaction networks in real time

• Work with small CSTRs, flow reactors, microfluidic devices, pumps, valves, tubing, flow cells and autosamplers

• Evaluate analytical technologies including Raman, UV-Vis, fluorescence, IR, NMR, LC-MS, HPLC, electrochemical sensing and low-cost process probes

• Build Python-based tools for data acquisition, instrument control, signal processing and visualisation

• Combine continuous measurements with sampled analytical data to reconstruct the time evolution of chemical mixtures

• Work closely with chemists, enzymologists, computational scientists and ML engineers to turn messy experimental signals into useful data

• Rapidly test, improve or discard experimental setups based on what the data actually show

• Help define the experimental measurement stack for Dayhoff’s work on dynamic chemistry and origins-of-life systems

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What We’re Looking For

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Experience

 

You will be expected to have some but not necessarily all of the following:

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• Experience building experimental hardware or analytical setups with your own hands

• Comfort working with liquid handling systems: pumps, valves, tubing, flow cells, leaks, bubbles, fouling and drift

• Experience with at least some analytical chemistry methods, for example spectroscopy, chromatography, mass spectrometry, NMR or electrochemical sensing

• Ability to write practical Python for data acquisition, analysis, plotting and automation

• A willingness to move between the wet lab, instrument manuals, notebooks, code, and physical prototyping

• Good scientific judgement about when a measurement is meaningful, when it is misleading, and when the setup needs to be rebuilt

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Also useful

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• Experience with any of Raman, FTIR, UV-Vis, fluorescence, online NMR, LC-MS, HPLC or MS workflows

• Familiarity with lab automation, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, LabJack, NI DAQ, serial instrument control, autosamplers or custom data logging

• Experience building fast prototypes in a startup, academic lab, instrument company or hardware-heavy research environment

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Essential Qualities

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• Practical: You can make a rough version work before turning it into a clean version

• Scientifically Rigorous: You care about controls, calibration, reproducibility and not fooling yourself

• Flexible: You are happy switching between chemistry, hardware, sensors, code and data

• Fast-Moving: You enjoy short experimental loops and are comfortable throwing away bad designs

• Collaborative: You can work with scientists and engineers from different backgrounds and translate between them

• Mission-Driven: You are excited by the possibility of building new tools for understanding how complex chemistry becomes life-like

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Apply

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Send your CV or resume, a short note describing your interest, and examples of systems, instruments, rigs, software, experiments or analyses you have built to careers@dayhofflabs.com