# Scientific Writer, Life Science

**Company:** [Astera](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/astera)
**Location:** Emeryville, CA
**Role:** Technical Writing
**Salary:** $120k – $180k/yr
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Scientific Writing, Copy Editing, Git, GitHub, Markdown, Jupyter Notebooks, Sphinx, Mkdocs, Quarto, Jupyter Book, D3, Observable, Plotly, Open-Source Software
**Posted:** 2026-08-26

> Scientific Writer supporting life science research programs through scientific editing, technical documentation, publication strategy, and creative scholarly communication. Requires a life science PhD with writing experience or equivalent industry experience, plus familiarity with developer documentation tools and open research formats.

## Job Description

## 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.

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