Senior Scientist – Protein Production

Helix Bio Structures, LLC (HBS) is a contract research organization based in Indianapolis, Indiana, providing early drug discovery services to the biopharmaceutical industry. HBS maintains a full suite of services that encompass chemical & structural analysis, protein production, computational modeling, and design. HBS’s core and most popular services are structural biology imaging techniques: X-ray Crystallography and Cryo-EM. HBS was founded in 2018 and has grown considerably.

We are looking to add a Senior Scientist focused on protein production to join our Indianapolis-based team.

This senior scientist will own recombinant protein production campaigns end-to-end, from construct design through expression, purification, and final quality control. The role spans multiple hosts and cell lines — bacterial, insect, mammalian, and yeast — and the full purification toolkit, with particular responsibility for the difficult targets that do not respond to standard approaches. As a senior member of the team, this scientist will mentor junior staff, author and maintain protocols and SOPs, own delivery timelines, and interface directly with clients on strategy, progress, and results.

Highly desirable hands‑on experiences include:

We are looking for a protein scientist who has already solved hard targets and can judge quickly which lever to pull next — construct boundaries, host, temperature, media, tags, fusion partners, chaperones, detergent, or refolding. The successful candidate will run several campaigns in parallel, hold a high bar on QC and documentation, and communicate honestly with clients and the HBS team about what is achievable and by when.

Prior industrial experience is strongly preferred: this is a service business, and timelines, reproducibility, and client communication carry the same weight as yield.

• Design constructs and production strategies for new targets, including boundary selection, tag and fusion partner choice, codon optimization, and host selection.
• Execute and troubleshoot expression across bacterial, insect, mammalian, and yeast systems, including transient transfection, stable pool generation, and cell‑free expression where appropriate.
• Run small‑scale expression and condition screens, then scale up through shake flask, wave, and bioreactor formats, optimizing media, induction, and harvest conditions.
• Develop and execute purification strategies using affinity and IMAC, ion exchange, size exclusion, hydrophobic interaction, and other chromatographic methods, including tag removal, refolding, and complex reconstitution.
• Solubilize and purify membrane proteins, including detergent and amphiphile screening and reconstitution into nanodiscs or other supports.
• Perform and interpret QC by SDS‑PAGE, analytical SEC, mass spectrometry, A280, and endotoxin testing, and deliver material to defined specifications for structural, biophysical, and functional studies.
• Own campaign timelines: plan resource needs, flag risk early, and keep client‑facing milestones on schedule.
• Interface directly with clients: participate in kickoff and scientific update calls, present results, and support technical scoping and feasibility discussions for…