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About the Role

As Principal Scientist, you will lead the science at our San Francisco site, managing a team of scientists and research associates. You will set experimental strategy, own scientific decisions, and remain hands-on with the most challenging problems. Your focus will be on deepening the understanding of organoid models, building reference data and controls, and owning assay development, technology transfer, and optimization for the platform.

Responsibilities

Lead the scientific team at our San Francisco site, including hiring, managing, and developing scientists and holding a high bar for experimental rigor and pace.
Set scientific direction and experimental strategy for the platform, and bring competing interpretations to a clear conclusion.
Run regular data review with the team, distinguishing biological effects from technical or process effects and driving toward the experiment that resolves the question.
Establish high standards for experimental design, controls, documentation, reproducibility, and scientific decision-making, and hold the team to them.
Facilitate productive scientific disagreement and reach clear conclusions quickly, without suppressing dissent or letting debate stall the work.
Serve as the scientific lead for external partner programs, from experimental design through data delivery.
Remain close to the bench and personally engage in difficult experimental and troubleshooting work.
Build biological systems from first principles, taking models from concept to working, characterized assays, and deepening the ones already running.
Own the development and maturation of biological assays and workflows intended for execution on the Parallel Bio platform.
Translate early R&D assays into robust, repeatable, scalable experimental processes.
Develop and execute characterization and optimization strategies for complex organoid and cell-based assays.
Identify critical assay and process parameters and understand how they influence biological outputs.
Design experiments that establish appropriate operating ranges, robustness, and sources of variability.
Lead troubleshooting of complex biological and process failures using structured, hypothesis-driven experimentation.
Define and build the framework for transferring assays and biological processes from R&D into development and ultimately routine Technical Operations.
Define clear entry and exit criteria for each stage of assay maturation and technology transfer.
Establish objective acceptance criteria for platform readiness, including controls, expected ranges, reproducibility requirements, and system suitability.
Ensure transferred assays have sufficient documentation, reference data, controls, and scientific understanding to support reliable execution.
Partner with Technical Operations to ensure new processes can be executed reproducibly by trained operators rather than only by their original developers.
Lead or support comparability studies when assays, instruments, workflows, reagents, software, or biological inputs change.
Develop strategies for scaling biological workflows from small exploratory experiments into higher-throughput platform processes.
Understand and reduce variability introduced by operators, instruments, automation, reagents, donors, biological materials, and environmental conditions.
Establish appropriate process controls and monitoring strategies for complex biological workflows.
Partner with automation and software teams to translate manual scientific workflows into automated, observable, and reproducible platform processes.
Identify where additional automation, instrumentation, software, or process controls will materially improve scientific performance.
Build processes that balance scientific rigor with throughput, cost, cycle time, and operational complexity.
Partner closely with R&D to ensure new assays are designed with eventual scale and platform implementation in mind and are ready to tech transfer.
Partner with Technical Operations to establish reliable processes for external project execution.
Work with Platform Software, automation, hardware, and data teams to ensure biological requirements are translated into effective platform capabilities.
Contribute to platform roadmap decisions by identifying scientific and process-development capabilities required for future programs.
Support external pharmaceutical programs by ensuring platform processes are scientifically defensible, reproducible, and appropriate for the questions being asked.

Requirements

Ph.D. in Immunology, Cell Biology, Biology, Bioengineering, Biomedical Engineering, Molecular Biology, or a related discipline.
Typically 10 to 15 or more years of relevant experience developing complex biological assays, models, and platforms.
Deep immunology expertise and hands-on work with complex human in vitro models, organoids, primary immune cells, or advanced mammalian cell culture.
Direct management of bench scientists, including setting scientific direction, running data review, and developing scientific judgment in a team.
Building biological systems from 0 to 1 and adapting them onto automated or higher-throughput platforms.
Experience building Process Development functions or technology-transfer frameworks in an early-stage biotechnology company.
Assay development, characterization, optimization, and technology transfer.
Identifying and controlling biological and technical sources of variability.
Developing assays or processes for automated or high-throughput environments.
Translating early-stage R&D methods into robust workflows used by other scientists or operational teams.
Establishing controls, acceptance criteria, reference standards, or system-suitability approaches for biological assays.
Leading technically complex investigations and experimental troubleshooting.
Comfortable setting scientific strategy and equally comfortable going to the bench when a difficult problem requires it.
Comfortable with ambiguity and bringing structure to immature technologies.
Excited by the opportunity to replace animal models with scalable human biology and fundamentally change how medicines are discovered.

Skills

Organoid models
AI
Human-first drug discovery
Experimental strategy
Scientific leadership
Assay development
Process development
Technology transfer
Troubleshooting
Data analysis
Experimental design
Reproducibility
Automation
Scale-up
Process controls
Cross-functional collaboration
Design of Experiments
Process characterization
Quality by Design

Location

San Francisco

Work Type

Full-time

Experience Level

Principal Scientist
10-15+ years of relevant experience

Education Level

Ph.D.

About the Company

Drug discovery has a translation problem: more than 95% of drugs that succeed in animal models fail in humans.
Building the alternative: human-first drug discovery, powered by organoids and AI, running on real human biology from the very first experiment.
Platform is 87% concordant with clinical patient data - a vast improvement over the 3% translational success rate of animals.
Demonstrated ability to model immunotoxicology, immunogen stimulation, and two autoimmune diseases with more on the way.
Numerous pharma partners including 3 Fortune 500 companies are already using the platform.
Raised ~$30M from AIX Ventures, Marc Benioff, Jeff Dean, and Y Combinator.
FDA Modernization Act 3.0 and the FDA's March 2026 validation framework provide regulatory tailwinds.
Generational opportunity to build the first scaled engine for generating real human biological data and fundamentally change how medicines are discovered.
Building human-first drug discovery: 10x faster, 1000x cheaper, 0 animals killed.

Equal Opportunity

Parallel Bio is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive and respectful workplace.
We encourage applications from individuals of all backgrounds, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, religion, disability, or sexual orientation.