Scientific Account Executive
Adaptyv
Summary
This is a hybrid sales and customer success role for someone with real scientific depth. You'll be the primary point of contact for customers — from first conversation through ongoing engagement. That means understanding what a protein design team is actually trying to achieve, helping them pick the right assays, making sure their experiments are set up correctly, and translating results back into language that's useful for their programs.
Job description
About the role
This is a hybrid sales and customer success role for someone with real scientific depth. You'll be the primary point of contact for customers — from first conversation through ongoing engagement. That means understanding what a protein design team is actually trying to achieve, helping them pick the right assays, making sure their experiments are set up correctly, and translating results back into language that's useful for their programs.
The day-to-day
- Running technical sales calls where you discuss binding kinetics, expression systems, and assay design, not just pricing
- Onboarding new customers and helping them design their first experiments on the platform
- Monitoring ongoing accounts, flagging issues early, and proactively suggesting next steps based on their results
- Working with the biology team to troubleshoot when a customer's experiment doesn't go as expected
- Identifying expansion opportunities within existing accounts — new targets, new assay types, larger campaigns
You won't be handed a script. You'll need to understand the science well enough to earn trust from PhD-level protein engineers and CSOs, while also being commercially sharp enough to close deals and grow accounts.
Responsibilities
- Own the full customer lifecycle: prospecting, technical sales conversations, deal closing, onboarding, and ongoing account management.
- Serve as the technical point of contact for customers. Understand their protein engineering goals and recommend the right experiments (binding, expression, thermostability, enzyme activity).
- Understand and explain our assay capabilities in depth: BLI, SPR, cell-free expression, and emerging assay types. Know when each is appropriate and what the data means.
- Work closely with the biology team to ensure experiments are designed correctly and results are communicated clearly.
- Build and maintain a pipeline of commercial opportunities across customer segments: AI-driven protein design companies, biotech startups, pharma R&D teams, and academic labs.
- Develop proposals and quotes tailored to customer needs, from small pilot experiments to large-scale data generation campaigns.
- Represent Adaptyv at conferences and industry events. Be able to have deep technical conversations at the booth, not just hand out brochures.
- Feed customer insights back to the product and biology teams: what assays are people asking for, what's missing, where are we losing deals.
What we're looking for
- Scientific background in protein engineering, biochemistry, biophysics, or a related field. You should be comfortable discussing binding kinetics (KD, kon, koff), expression systems, and assay design without needing to look things up.
- Experience in a customer-facing technical role: field application scientist, technical sales, scientific account management, or similar. CRO or biotech vendor experience is a strong plus.
- Commercially driven. You care about revenue, pipeline, and closing deals, not just having interesting scientific conversations.
- Strong communicator who can adapt to the audience: detailed and technical with a scientist, concise and business-focused with a VP.
- Self-starter who can manage their own pipeline and priorities without heavy oversight.
- Genuine interest in AI-driven protein design and the companies working in this space. You follow what's happening in the field.
Requirements
- Scientific background in protein engineering, biochemistry, biophysics, or a related field
- Comfortable discussing binding kinetics (KD, kon, koff), expression systems, and assay design
- Experience in a customer-facing technical role: field application scientist, technical sales, scientific account management, or similar
- CRO or biotech vendor experience is a strong plus
- Commercially driven with focus on revenue, pipeline, and closing deals
- Strong communicator able to adapt to audience
- Self-starter who can manage own pipeline and priorities
- Genuine interest in AI-driven protein design
Company overview
Adaptyv Bio is a pioneering biotechnology company based in Lausanne, Switzerland, that is revolutionizing protein engineering through automated laboratory infrastructure. Founded in 2021 and backed by YCombinator, the company has raised $8 million in seed funding to build what it calls a 'cloud lab for protein designers.' Their mission is to make proteins easier to engineer by providing automated wet lab services that enable rapid experimental validation of AI-designed proteins. Adaptyv addresses a critical bottleneck in the protein design field: while AI models can generate novel protein sequences, testing these designs in physical laboratories remains slow, expensive, and complex. The company's automated foundry allows protein designers to upload their computational designs and receive experimental data through standardized assays, dramatically reducing the time and cost of protein validation. Their platform has already tested over 10,000 proteins for more than 30 companies, including major pharmaceutical firms and AI research labs. Adaptyv also operates Proteinbase, an open data platform that serves as a central repository for experimental protein design data, promoting transparency and collaboration in the field. By bridging the gap between computational protein design and experimental validation, Adaptyv is accelerating the development of novel therapeutics, enzymes, and functional materials.