Scientific Writer, Life Science (Radial)
Astera Institute · Emeryville · $120,000–$180,000 (stated in the posting)
About Astera:
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. We have committed a $3.5B endowment to that work and fit the form of our support to the function it serves: grants, investments, and in-house research programs. We accept meaningful risk in the research we back and expect some of it to fail because transformative ideas are rarely the ones already proven. Our projects, and the foundation itself, operate like high-velocity startups, with a high performance bar and competitive compensation to match. We are searching for leaders who are compelled by the challenge of driving high-impact change in the way science is funded, conducted, and communicated. You can read more about our mission, vision, and programming at astera.org/vision.
About Radial
Radial is a research organization within Astera focused on rethinking life science research at a systems level. The systems that enable how we fund, do, and build upon science have long needed an update. At Radial, we design, fund, and operate programs that tackle foundational scientific problems while simultaneously testing better ways to do science. We're looking for people who are willing to take big risks, build useful things and share their learnings in the open.
Position Summary
Radial is seeking a Scientific Writer to shape and sharpen the scientific content our teams publish — editing research outputs for argument and clarity, drafting blog posts from interviews and raw results, and helping our scientists release work in formats better suited to it than a static PDF. This position reports to the CEO of Radial.
You have a real appetite for creative scholarly communication (e.g. interactive figures, video, executable models) and you're motivated by what happens after publication: work that others can reuse, build on, and openly critique. You'll draft and edit, direct figure and design work, and train researchers at Radial on what good scholarly communications looks like. You'll support Radial’s programs, like Deliverome, OpenADMET, Prism, and the Radial Residency, with audiences ranging from structural biologists and biochemists to gene delivery researchers and prospective residents.
This is a full-time position.
Responsibilities:
Scientific Writing
Edit research outputs and scientific publications — both content editing (argument, structure, framing, what the reader needs to know) and copy editing
Draft and edit blog posts from interviews with scientists, internal documents, and raw results
Publication and release
Ensure every release meets Astera's Open Science policy — persistent identifiers, open licenses, data in FAIR repositories, runnable code — and maintain the pipeline of upcoming pubs
Advise on publication strategy and ideal unit of release: help scientists find the smallest independently useful thing they could publish now
Creative and visual communication
Work with scientists to identify findings that are poorly served by conventional formats, and propose alternatives: interactive figures, web-hosted visualizations, executable code, etc.
Direct external designers and developers on figures, interactive builds, and demos: write the brief, judge the result, manage the revision loop
Build templates and tools that make those formats a cheap default rather than a one-off effort
Refine slide decks for talks, funder meetings, and internal reviews
Documentation support
Help researchers document the computational methods and algorithms our programs produce: what the method does, what it assumes, what its parameters mean, how it fails, and how a user can tell whether it worked
Partner with Data Steward on documentation and dataset standards for open-source releases
Qualifications and Experience
PhD in a life science field plus at least 2 years of work experience in scientific writing and editing; or 5+ years of equivalent industry experience.
Technical depth: you can read a method section or a codebase in an unfamiliar area, work out what the algorithm actually does, and ask the author the question that exposes the undocumented assumption.
Demonstrated technical writing — documentation, tutorials, or method write-ups you can point to, ideally public
Demonstrated editing range: you can improve someone else's argument and structure, then copy edit the result, without flattening their voice
Comfort with Git/GitHub, Markdown, notebooks, and at least one documentation toolchain (Sphinx, MkDocs, Quarto, Jupyter Book, or similar)
Judgment about audience: you can tell the difference between documentation for a method's likely users, a post for a general scientific reader, and a proposal for a funder, and you write differently for each
Experience publishing research outputs in formats other than the static PDF — interactive figures, executable notebooks, navigable datasets, or web-native pubs
Ability to work across several programs in different technical domains
Preferred:
experience building interactive scientific content (e.g. D3, Observable, Plotly, Quarto, or similar)
experience maintaining or contributing to open-source scientific software
familiarity with any of our domains — structural biology, drug discovery and ADMET, gene and drug delivery, or scientific infrastructure
Location
This position is on site at our office in Emeryville, CA. Some travel may be required from time-to-time for in-person collaboration and work.
Compensation
Range: $120-180K
The posted salary range is based on location in the Bay Area. The successful candidate will receive a competitive compensation package, commensurate with their experience and location.
Cultural Alignment
Surprising problem-solver – you love finding unexpected solutions to problems we don't even know we have, and see options where others only see constraints.
Flexible by default – you don't draw hard lines around your job description and expect your role to evolve significantly over 6–12 months.
Bias to action – you launch and iterate on thoughtful experiments rather than waiting for perfect plans, and you're energized by novel problems.
High standards, internally driven – you believe you can build the world's best vehicle for unleashing extraordinary individuals to create public goods, and you hold yourself to that bar without benchmarking against others.
Open to feedback – You create opportunities to give and receive honest feedback, staying focused on both personal and team growth, and committing to transparency even when it’s uncomfortable.
Operate with the highest levels of integrity, judgment, and stewardship -- you treat residents, peers, and vendors with genuine respect for their time and contributions.
Embrace the tools that define great work today – Astera is building for an AI-driven future and equips the team accordingly. We see these as genuine force multipliers, not optional extras, and we expect our people to use them.