Scientific Writer, Life Science

Responsibilities

Scientific writing

• Edit research outputs and scientific publications for argument, structure, framing, clarity, and copy-editing quality.
• Draft and edit blog posts from scientist interviews, internal documents, and raw results.

Publication and release

• Ensure releases meet Astera’s Open Science policy, including persistent identifiers, open licenses, FAIR data repositories, and runnable code.
• Maintain the pipeline of upcoming publications.
• Advise on publication strategy and identify the smallest independently useful unit that can be released.

Creative and visual communication

• Identify findings that are poorly served by conventional formats and propose alternatives such as interactive figures, web-hosted visualizations, and executable code.
• Direct external designers and developers on figures, interactive builds, and demos, including writing briefs, evaluating results, and managing revisions.
• Build templates and tools that make alternative formats inexpensive and repeatable.
• Refine slide decks for talks, funder meetings, and internal reviews.

Documentation support

• Help researchers document computational methods and algorithms, including their purpose, assumptions, parameters, failure modes, and validation criteria.
• Partner with the Data Steward on documentation and dataset standards for open-source releases.

Requirements

• PhD in a life science field and at least 2 years of scientific writing and editing experience, or 5+ years of equivalent industry experience.
• Ability to understand unfamiliar method sections and codebases, determine what algorithms do, and identify undocumented assumptions.
• Demonstrated technical writing experience, such as documentation, tutorials, or method write-ups; public examples are preferred.
• Demonstrated editing range, including improving argument and structure while preserving the author’s voice, followed by copy editing.
• Comfort with Git, GitHub, Markdown, notebooks, and at least one documentation toolchain such as Sphinx, MkDocs, Quarto, or Jupyter Book.
• Ability to tailor writing for method users, general scientific audiences, and funders.
• Experience publishing research outputs in formats beyond static PDFs, such as interactive figures, executable notebooks, navigable datasets, or web-native publications.
• Ability to work across multiple programs and technical domains.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience building interactive scientific content with D3, Observable, Plotly, Quarto, or similar tools.
• Experience maintaining or contributing to open-source scientific software.
• Familiarity with structural biology, drug discovery and ADMET, gene and drug delivery, or scientific infrastructure.

Compensation

• Annual salary range: $120,000–$180,000 USD.
• Competitive compensation package based on experience and location.
• Some travel may be required for in-person collaboration and work.