Recursion

Research Associate, Global Lab Services Returnship

Salt Lake City, Utah
Full-time
Posted Nov 11, 2026

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Skills

Jira

Job description

Your work will change lives. Including your own. 

We are building a future where biology is solvable.     

The path to new medicines is currently slow and expensive, with high failure rates, leaving millions of patients waiting for new treatment options. Our story is one of innovation: applying AI, vast datasets, and industrial scale to decode biology and accelerate the development of life-changing treatments.    

Recursion’s Returnship Program

Recursion’s Returnship program, sponsored by the Women at Recursion Employee Resource Group, helps professionals who have taken a break of two or more years from the STEM industry return to the workforce. Participants work in a supportive, learning-focused environment with guidance from their teams and mentors.

Our program benefits both sides. You’ll own projects that directly advance our mission to radically decode biology and serve patients, and you’ll build experience with new, cutting-edge tools and technology. In turn, Recursion gains access to an underutilized pool of talent in Utah and benefits from the skills and experience you’ve built through your work and life.

What you’ll get

•A dedicated mentor who meets with you weekly

•Weekly seminars on workplace culture, communication, and technology

•Support from your team as you re-enter the workforce

Our program runs for sixteen weeks, from March 2027 through the end of June 2027. Depending on performance and business needs, it may lead to full-time employment. This position is primarily based at our Salt Lake City, UT headquarters, with some hybrid flexibility.

Research Associate Returnship

The Global Lab Services team keeps Recursion’s laboratories safe, compliant, and running smoothly. Our team covers equipment, facilities, environmental health and safety (EHS), and lab operations, and we work closely with scientific teams across the company, including biologists, chemists, automation and software engineers, assay operations, and data scientists. When an operational problem slows down the science, we find out why and build a lasting fix.

As a Research Associate, you will collaborate closely with the Global Lab Services team and the scientific teams it supports to design and develop programs for lab operations, from understanding the problem through building the structure that keeps a program running day to day. We are seeking an individual who is curious about how labs run, enjoys digging into operational hurdles to find their root cause, and is comfortable planning, organizing, and working across teams to arrive at practical solutions. Experience building SOPs, software tools, or AI interfaces is a plus. A strong desire to learn new skills, tools, and approaches is essential to thrive in our fast-paced environment.

Working alongside Recursion’s Global Lab Services team, you will work on projects such as:

•Develop environmental monitoring and tracking programs : Build a process to respond to, document, and track environmental baseline conditions and contamination events across our labs, including root-cause investigation and trend reporting.

•Write EHS technical documents , including SOPs, safety guidance, and training materials that help teams work safely and stay compliant.

•Design lab operations : Map current workflows, identify operational hurdles, and build programs with clear roles, processes, and measures of success.

•Build program structure with SOPs, tracking tools, and software systems that make programs easy to adopt and sustain.

•Explore AI tools and interfaces that help scientists and lab staff find information, report issues, or follow procedures (a plus, not a requirement).

•Partner cross-functionally with equipment, facilities, EHS, and scientific teams to gather requirements, test solutions, and roll out new programs.

•Learn about lab operations, including equipment management, facilities, safety compliance, and how each one supports high-throughput science.

•The Recursion Community                    

Cutting-edge tools matter, but our people are what set us apart. Our structure and culture are built to help you do your best work, not to feed politics or ego. We live by values that give us a real competitive advantage. They help us work better and faster without relying on burnout, and they encourage us to make leaps where others take steps. People in every role and at every level make the bold bets that move us forward.

The Returnship gives you a front-row seat to this culture. From your first week, you’ll work alongside teams who value collaboration over ego, with a mentor in your corner and real ownership of projects that matter. You won’t be on the sidelines while you ramp up.

The Experience You’ll Need

•3+ years of working experience in a research laboratory, lab operations, EHS, or a related scientific setting.

•Bachelor’s Degree or higher in a scientific, engineering, or related field.

•2+ years break from employment

•A strong desire to learn with excellent written and verbal communication skills.

•Attentive to detail, with the ability to write clear, accurate procedures and documentation.

•Enjoy working both independently and collaboratively with cross-functional teams.

•Experience with SOP development, process improvement, project coordination, or Jira software and AI tools is a plus.

The Values We Hope You Share:

•We act boldly with integrity. We are unconstrained in our thinking, take calculated risks, and push boundaries, but never at the expense of ethics, science, or trust. 

•We care deeply and engage directly. Caring means holding a deep sense of responsibility and respect - showing up, speaking honestly, and taking action.

•We learn actively and adapt rapidly. Progress comes from doing. We experiment, test, and refine, embracing iteration over perfection.

•We move with urgency because patients are waiting. Speed isn’t about rushing but about moving the needle every day.

•We take ownership and accountability. Through ownership and accountability, we enable trust and autonomy—leaders take accountability for decisive action, and teams own outcomes together. 

•We are One Recursion. True cross-functional collaboration is about trust, clarity, humility, and impact. Through sharing, we can be greater than the sum of our individual capabilities.

Our values underpin the employee experience at Recursion. They are the character and personality of the company demonstrated through how we communicate, support one another, spend our time, make decisions, and celebrate collectively.

More About Recursion

Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX) is a clinical-stage TechBio company decoding biology to radically improve lives. Recursion is advancing a portfolio of differentiated investigational medicines across its wholly owned and partnered pipeline in oncology, rare disease, neuroscience, immunology, and other therapeutic areas with significant unmet need. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, an AI-native, end-to-end drug discovery and development platform integrating biology, chemistry, and clinical development into a unified intelligence system. Powered by proprietary multimodal data, purpose-built AI models, and bilingual teams fluent in both science and AI, the Recursion OS is designed to translate complex science into medicines that matter — faster, better, and at scale — for patients who are waiting.

Recursion’s platform infrastructure is anchored in Salt Lake City, Utah and Milton Park, Oxfordshire, where its automated biology and chemistry laboratories generate proprietary data at industrial scale. Recursion also maintains offices in New York, Montréal, and London, three global hubs for talent and leadership at the intersection of AI and scientific innovation. Learn more at www.recursion.com , or connect on X and LinkedIn .

Recursion is an Equal Opportunity Employer.  All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, local, or provincial human rights legislation. 

Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.

Recursion leverages AI in our hiring process. We use Greenhouse's Talent Matching AI technology feature to help review applications against the skills and experience we've identified as important for this role. It analyzes your resume and application responses to assess how closely your qualifications match our criteria - but all decisions are made by our human recruiters and hiring managers, including whether to move to the next phase of review. Talent Matching does not automatically advance or reject any candidate.  By submitting your application, you acknowledge that you have been informed about and consent to this use of the Talent Matching tool in our review process. Please refer to our Recursion Privacy Policy at  https://www.recursion.com/privacy-notice/ for more information about our processing of personal data and your rights. 

Recruitment & Staffing Agencies: Recursion Pharmaceuticals and its affiliate companies do not accept resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Recursion or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Recursion’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Recursion, and Recursion will not owe any referral or other fees. Our team will communicate directly with candidates who are not represented by an agent or intermediary unless otherwise agreed to prior to interviewing for the job.