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Scientific Writer, Life Science (Radial)

Astera Institute· Radial
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Emeryville HQ$120k - $180kFull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

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 full-time on-site role reports to the CEO of Radial and involves creative scholarly communication, publication strategy, and supporting program outputs across Radial.

Responsibilities

  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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

  • 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 tailor content for method users, general scientific readers, or funders
  • Experience publishing research outputs in formats other than 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 (D3, Observable, Plotly, Quarto), experience maintaining/open-source scientific software, familiarity with structural biology, drug discovery/ADMET, gene/drug delivery, or scientific infrastructure

Skills

Required:Scientific writing and editingPublication strategy

Benefits

  • Benefits Summary available via company link (see posting)
Last updated Sep 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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