Research Scientist/Engineer, Deep Brain Two Photon Imaging and Optogenetics

About Astera: Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. We believe the coming years will bring an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advancement as exponential progress in AI converges with central advances in other fields to accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive progress. We have committed a $3.5B endowment to that work and fit the form of our support to the function it serves: grants, investments, and in-house research programs. We accept meaningful risk in the research we back and expect some of it to fail because transformative ideas are rarely the ones already proven. Our projects, and the foundation itself, operate like high-velocity startups, with a high performance bar and competitive compensation to match. We are searching for leaders who are compelled by the challenge of driving high-impact change in the way science is funded, conducted, and communicated. You can read more about our mission, vision, and programming at astera.org/vision . Company Overview Astera Neuro seeks to understand and engineer consciousness. We believe consciousness is the process by which the brain builds a coherent internal model of the world and the self. We aim to understand this model and to develop the technologies to write experience directly into the brain. By combining large-scale neural recording, causal perturbation, and brain-based AI, we seek to move neuroscience from observing correlates of experience to engineering it. The same tools carry direct therapeutic promise for neurological and psychiatric diseases that alter perception, thought, and sense of self. Because the science and tools required do not yet exist, we are assembling a founding team of neuroscientists, theorists, and engineers to create them. We do high-risk, high-reward science in a well-resourced, collaborative environment with competitive pay, and share everything openly under Astera's Open Science Policy. Position Summary We're hiring a PhD-level scientist/engineer to join Astera Neuro's neuroscience team, working to read, write, and perturb the contents of cognition in the primate brain at single-cell resolution. Astera Neuro is Astera's initiative to decode how patterns of neural activity become the thoughts, perceptions, and memories of conscious experience. We work from the hypothesis that the brain uses a compositional architecture, and we aim to move neuroscience from observation to engineering by reading from and writing to neural circuits at scale. Your initial assignment is to develop and optimize an optical implant for high resolution two photon imaging and optogenetics deep in the brain. While parallel Astera efforts target surface structures with conventional cranial windows, many key structures for cognition sit in brain sulci, millimeters below the surface. You'll oversee the full toolkit development: optimizing the optics (GRIN lenses, microprisms, micro-objectives), the surgical implantation procedure, and integration with the two photon holographic microscope. The work spans optical engineering to systems and cognitive neuroscience. The ideal candidate is an experimentalist who can carry the work end-to-end: designing a GRIN lens system in the morning, running a closed-loop holographic write-in on the rig in the afternoon, and writing the population-analysis pipeline that evening. You want institutional support and the freedom to move fast on a problem that matters. What You’ll Do Design and iterate GRIN lens and/or microprism assembly for deep brain imaging in the primate brain, with early optimization in rodents. Develop and help execute the surgical implantation procedure Run two-photon imaging and holographic photostimulation experiments: read population activity during the task, then write in and perturb the held representation at single-cell resolution.