Senior Bioprocess Engineer

Location: On-site, New Haven, CT Company: Bexorg (Bexorg.com)

About Bexorg

Bexorg is a TechBio company pioneering a completely new way to understand and treat neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Building on the landmark 2019 Nature paper by Zvonimir Vrselja and Nenad Sestan demonstrating that mammalian brain cellular functions can be partially restored hours after death, Bexorg uses donated, intact human brains to develop transformative therapeutics for the most challenging diseases affecting humanity.

Headquartered in New Haven, CT, Bexorg has raised $42M to date and is already generating substantial revenue through collaborations with leading biopharma companies. Our flagship platform, BrainEx, is the world's first system to perfuse fresh, whole human postmortem brains through their intact vasculature — restoring and maintaining cellular biology, vascular reactivity, CSF circulation, and an intact blood-brain barrier — and is the foundation of an active CNS therapeutics pipeline that includes a Phase 1 program in Alzheimer's disease.

The Role

We are seeking a Senior Bioprocess Engineer to own the iterative engineering of the BrainEx whole-brain perfusion platform. BrainEx is a proprietary closed-loop physiological system that functions as an artificial cardiovascular, pulmonary, and renal system for an intact human brain — with custom hardware and software regulating circulatory volume, cerebral blood flow, systolic pressure, pH, dissolved gases, temperature, metabolites, and drug dosing throughout each run.

You will be responsible for continuously improving the performance, reliability, features, and automation of the BrainEx platform: tightening closed-loop control, extending run duration (currently up to 24 hours, with active work toward multi-day and ultimately two-week runs), improving reproducibility across runs, and expanding the experimental capabilities the rig can support.

This is a hands-on, senior technical role for someone who wants to own and evolve a first-of-its-kind bioprocess system in close collaboration with surgeons, perfusion technicians, software engineers, and drug discovery scientists.

What You'll Do

Platform Architecture & Engineering

• Own the end-to-end bioprocess engineering of BrainEx perfusion rigs — from subsystem-level redesigns through deployment of new revisions on the production fleet.
• Specify, integrate, and continuously improve the rig's hardware components: peristaltic and centrifugal pumps, valves, manifolds, oxygenators, hemofiltration / dialysis modules, heat exchangers, reservoirs, bubble traps, and inline sensors.
• Architect and refine the closed-loop physiological control of:
  • Cerebral blood flow and systolic pressure profiles, including pulsatility
  • Circulatory volume and fluid balance
  • Temperature
  • pH, dissolved gases (pO₂, pCO₂), and gas exchange
  • Hemofiltration, dialysis, and metabolite/waste management
  • Synthetic blood (oxygen-carrier perfusate) handling, conditioning, and recirculation
  • Compound dosing concentrations, infusion timing, and arterial/venous sampling cadence
• Drive design improvements that increase run duration, reduce failure modes, and expand the experimental envelope of the platform (e.g., new sampling capabilities, regional perfusion control, modeling of pathophysiological states such as ischemia/stroke).

Automation & Control

• Develop robust automation for the full perfusion workflow: rig setup and priming, calibration, run initiation, steady-state operation, perturbation and dosing protocols, monitoring, fault detection, and safe shutdown.
• Implement and maintain the supervisory control software that coordinates pumps, valves, gas mixers, dialysis, sensors, and dosing — including PID/cascade control loops, state machines, and safety interlocks.
• Build real-time monitoring, alarming, and operator interfaces so that runs can be supervised reliably with minimal technical intervention.
• Collaborate with software engineers to integrate the rig with higher-level orchestration, telemetry pipelines, the AWS data lake, and LIMS/ELN tooling.

Reliability, Performance & Iteration

• Rapidly prototype, test, and iterate on mechanical, fluidic, electrical, and control changes — moving from concept to production-grade rig revisions on a fast cadence.
• Define and refine acceptance tests, performance metrics, QC criteria, and validation protocols for each rig revision (perfusion confirmation metrics, BBB integrity, viability, physiological parameter envelopes, run-success rate).
• Drive root-cause analysis and systematic debugging of mechanical, fluidic, electrical, and software issues across the deployed fleet; close the loop with design fixes that prevent recurrence.
• Track and improve mean time between failures, run yield, reproducibility across donors, and the duration ceiling of the platform.

Leadership & Collaboration

• Serve as a senior technical authority on the BrainEx platform within Bexorg — setting bioprocess engineering best practices and technical standards.
• Mentor and guide junior engineers, technicians, and perfusionists on the rig's design, operation, and troubleshooting.
• Work cross-functionally with surgeons, perfusion specialists, neuroscientists, and drug discovery teams to translate evolving experimental needs into concrete, robust rig improvements.
• Communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including collaborators at major biopharma companies, foundation partners, and government grantors.

Requirements

• Extensive hands-on experience designing, building, and deploying complex bioprocess, organ perfusion, or fluidic/medical-device systems in production or mission-critical environments.
• Demonstrated track record of leading bioprocess or perfusion-system projects end-to-end: requirements, design, build, commissioning, validation, and ongoing support.
• Strong expertise in several of the following areas:
  • Closed-loop control of pressure, flow, temperature, pH, and dissolved gases
  • Fluid handling and circuit design: pumps (peristaltic, centrifugal), valves, manifolds, reservoirs, bubble traps, and tubing/connector selection
  • Gas exchange (membrane oxygenators, hollow-fiber modules) and dialysis/hemofiltration
  • Sensor integration: pressure transducers, flow probes, blood gas / pH / metabolite analyzers, temperature probes, and inline optical sensors
  • Real-time and supervisory control software (e.g., LabVIEW, PLC/SCADA, Python-based control stacks, or equivalent); experience with industrial control or ROS-2 ecosystems is a plus
  • Mechatronics: integration of sensors, actuators, pumps, valves, and control electronics
• Comfortable working in a hands-on wet-lab environment with biological tissue, plumbing, fluidics, and active hardware bring-up.
• Excellent communication skills and demonstrated experience mentoring and leading junior engineers.
• Proven ability to operate as an aggressive self-starter: you take ownership, move quickly, and drive projects forward with minimal supervision.
• Bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Bioprocess Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Controls, or a related field — or equivalent industry experience with a strong track record of impact.

Nice to Have

• Direct experience with extracorporeal life support or organ perfusion systems: ECMO, cardiopulmonary bypass, normothermic machine perfusion (e.g., liver, kidney, heart, lung), or hemodialysis platforms.
• Experience developing or scaling medical devices, lab automation platforms, or continuous bioprocess systems that must run reliably for long durations (multi-day to multi-week).
• Background working with synthetic blood, hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers, perfluorocarbons, or other engineered perfusates.
• Experience in biopharma, biotech, or medical devices, especially with regulated environments (ISO 13485, GMP/GxP, FDA submissions, or similar).
• Familiarity with biostatistics, DOE, and process capability analysis applied to bioprocess validation.
• Advanced degree (MS or PhD) in a relevant field.

Why Bexorg

• Work on a truly unique, first-of-its-kind bioprocess platform at the intersection of physiology, engineering, and CNS drug discovery — there is nothing else like BrainEx in the world.
• Your engineering improvements directly translate into better human-brain pharmacology data and, ultimately, into therapeutics for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, and other devastating neurodegenerative diseases.
• Collaborate with world-class scientists, engineers, surgeons, and clinicians in a fast-moving, well-funded TechBio company with active partnerships across major biopharma, leading academic institutions, and the Michael J. Fox Foundation.
• On-site, hardware-focused work in New Haven, CT, with daily, hands-on access to the systems you design and improve.

If you're excited to own and evolve the engineering of a platform that could fundamentally change how the world develops CNS therapeutics, we'd love to hear from you.