About the Role
This is a rare opportunity to join as a Founding Scientist / Co-Founder at an early-stage startup at the intersection of AI and wet-lab biology, operating within the aerospace and defense sector. You will combine hands-on biological expertise with computational thinking to shape the company's scientific strategy and core technology — bridging laboratory work with AI-driven workflows to accelerate discovery.
This role is on-site in Germany. Candidates must be eligible to work in Germany without visa sponsorship.
What You'll Do
Define and lead the scientific vision and research roadmap for early-stage AI + wet-lab products.
Design and execute key experiments in molecular biology, biochemistry, or genomics to validate models and assays.
Collaborate closely with engineers and ML researchers to translate experimental needs into computational requirements.
Implement and oversee lab automation and data pipelines to scale experiments and improve reproducibility.
Prototype computational tools and analyses; contribute code or notebooks integrating wet-lab data with models.
Mentor and recruit early scientific hires; establish laboratory best practices and safety standards.
Help navigate sector-specific constraints unique to aerospace and defense applications.
What We're Looking For
Required:
PhD in Biotechnology, Genomics, Biology, or a closely related field.
Senior-level research experience in molecular biology, biochemistry, genomics, biotech, or equivalent industry background.
Demonstrated experience applying AI/ML to biological data (computational biology, bioinformatics, or similar).
Experience in or familiarity with aerospace or defense domains, including an understanding of sector-specific constraints.
Comfortable with computational thinking and coding; experience with ML is a strong plus.
Must be eligible to work in Germany without visa sponsorship.
Nice to Have:
Prior experience at AI-for-biology companies, biotech startups, or similar industry environments.
Hands-on lab automation experience.
Prior founder experience or direct experience scaling early-stage teams and operations.
Entrepreneurial mindset with comfort navigating ambiguity in a fast-moving startup environment.
Strong cross-functional communication and collaboration skills.
Ideal Background: Research or training at a leading institution or university, with a track record that combines rigorous wet-lab science and computational fluency. Candidates with backgrounds at defense-adjacent biotech firms or aerospace technology companies are particularly well-suited.
What You'll Be Building
You will work at the frontier of AI-accelerated biology, helping to build systems that tightly integrate machine learning models with experimental wet-lab workflows. The team values intellectual curiosity, a bias toward action, and the ability to move fluidly between the bench and the codebase.
Location & Work Arrangement
Location: Germany (on-site)
Remote: Not available for this role
Visa Sponsorship: Not available — candidates must have existing eligibility to work in Germany
Clera is building autonomous AI agents that handle end-to-end recruiting operations. The company's AI agents find candidates, write personalized outreach, handle conversations, qualify fit, and schedule interviews without human intervention. Clera has raised pre-seed funding from top investors and has grown to marketplace scale with 40,000+ talents and hundreds of top startup customers. The company is now scaling its AI-native recruiting platform by hiring operators who supervise the agents, handle high-judgment moments, and close candidates that require human touch.
