Senior Applications Scientist - San Francisco Bay Area

Senior Applications Scientist — San Francisco Bay Area San Francisco Bay Area, CA | remote | Full-time | Approximately 50% travel Annual base salary: $120,000–$135,000 USD, depending on experience, plus equity

The Role

Caladan Bio is hiring a Senior Applications Scientist based in the San Francisco Bay Area to support the growth of the Caladan 250 bioreactor platform across the Bay Area and broader U.S. market.

You will play a key role in supporting Caladan’s customers and growing our regional presence. Your primary focus will be helping customers successfully install, operate, and expand their use of the Caladan 250. You will also serve as Caladan’s technical representative during sales conversations, customer meetings, demonstrations, and industry events.

You will report to Caladan’s VP of Commercial and work closely with the Sales, Operations and Engineering teams.

What You’ll Do

Applications and Customer Success

• Lead and support system installations, customer training, onboarding, and early experiments.
• Help customers design, execute, and troubleshoot bioreactor experiments.
• Provide remote and on-site support for bioprocess and platform-related issues.
• Build strong relationships with users and help ensure they are active, supported, and successful.
• Independently manage customer needs while escalating technical issues when appropriate.

Regional Commercial Support

• Serve as the technical expert during regional sales conversations, demonstrations, and customer meetings.
• Support conferences, trade shows, and other regional activities.
• Help identify expansion opportunities within existing accounts.

Voice of the Customer

• Track customer issues, feature requests, and feedback.
• Share field insights with the engineering teams.
• Help improve documentation, training materials, support workflows, and regional playbooks.

What You’ll Bring

• BS, MS, or PhD in chemical engineering, bioengineering, biotechnology, microbiology, or a related field.
• At least five (5) years of hands-on experience with bioreactors, fermentation, cell culture, or upstream bioprocessing.
• Experience designing, executing, and troubleshooting benchtop bioreactor experiments.
• Strong customer-facing communication and relationship-building skills.
• The ability to work independently and manage multiple customer priorities.
• Strong written documentation and organizational skills.

Experience in any of the following areas is particularly valuable:

• Microbial fermentation or cell culture
• Process development or scale-down models
• High-throughput bioprocessing or laboratory automation

Location and Travel

• Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the ability to visit customer sites regularly.
• Approximately 50% travel, depending on customer installations and regional activity.
• Frequent travel to customer sites throughout the Bay Area and the West Coast.
• Additional domestic travel for customer work, training, internal meetings, and industry events.
• Comfortable working in laboratory environments and assisting with the setup and installation of benchtop laboratory equipment.
• All required business travel expenses are covered.

What Success Looks Like

During your first year, you will:

• Independently support installations, training, and customer experiments across the region.
• Develop strong relationships with Caladan’s customers in the Bay Area and broader U.S. market.
• Provide responsive support to West Coast customers and coordinate with colleagues across U.S. time zones.
• Help establish repeatable applications, customer-success, and regional support processes.
• Contribute to the growth of existing accounts and the development of Caladan’s regional market.

About Caladan Bio Caladan Bio is building the next generation of biomanufacturing technology. Our mission is to help industrial biology and biopharma companies bring bio-based products to market faster. The Caladan 250 is a high-throughput benchtop bioreactor platform designed to increase experimental capacity while making bioprocess development more accessible, flexible, and efficient. Caladan Bio is backed by Twelve Below, Lerer Hippeau, Collaborative Fund, and Wireframe Ventures.