What do the first weeks look like for new team members at Adaptyv, both work-wise and as part of the team? How do you ensure they feel they are making a tangible contribution to the company’s success from their very first week?

There’s no three-month ramp-up at Adaptyv – you’ll be involved in work with real stakes from day one. In your first week, you’ll be running experiments, writing code or building automation that directly contributes to customer projects. We won’t throw you in at the deep end: we’ll pair you with teammates and give you context on whatever assay, workflow or system you’re joining. But then we expect you to figure it out yourself.

We’re growing so fast that every person we hire fills a gap that needed filling yesterday. Last year alone we onboarded over 50 new customers, including some of the world’s largest pharma companies, several leading AI drug discovery companies and dozens of biotech start-ups from around the globe. It’s intense, sometimes chaotic, but the people who thrive here love that feeling of being essential from the start. Because they genuinely are.

Adaptyv Bio is a melting pot of biology, engineering and data. For a young professional, how does this unique environment help them break out of their academic ‘silo’ to become a more versatile and well-rounded employee?

Our team sits at the intersection of biology, software engineering, automation and AI – and nobody stays in their lane. At Adaptyv, you pick up skills you never planned to learn, simply because the problem in front of you demands it. Biologists need to be able to script liquid handler protocols and software engineers need to understand how a data model for protein constructs should look. We’re too small and moving too fast for anyone to only do ‘their thing’ – and we’ve found that the best solutions come from people who understand both the biology and the systems around it. After a year here, most Adaptyv employees can hold a conversation across two or three disciplines they’d never explored before. That kind of versatility comes from being thrown into real problems alongside people with very different expertise.

Start-ups move fast. How do you empower your team members to take initiative on new ideas or technical improvements? What kind of support do they receive when they want to explore a new direction?

We have a simple philosophy: the person closest to the problem is the best person to solve it. There’s very little top-down project planning at Adaptyv. We set the direction (e.g. what assays we’re developing, what platform capabilities we need) and then the people working on those workflows decide how to get there. In short, we give you the resources you need, whether that’s software tools, lab equipment or budget. But then we get out of your way. If you see a bottleneck in a protocol, you’re expected to fix it. If a piece of automation would save hours, you build it. This only works with people who are self-driven and comfortable with ambiguity. We’re constantly understaffed relative to the opportunities in front of us, so if you wait for someone to tell you what to do next, the work simply won’t get done. The upside is that you can have an enormous, immediate impact.

We often hear that everyone’s voice matters in a start-up. In concrete terms, how do you involve junior team members in key discussions? What opportunities do they have to lead projects or specific initiatives early on?

We don’t really distinguish between junior and senior when it comes to ownership. If you’re the one running a particular assay or managing a workflow, you’re the expert. We’ve had people who only joined the company a few months prior leading the rollout of new experimental methods or redesigning how we track samples, because they were the ones who understood the problem best.

In practice, this means you’re in the room – as a contributor, not an observer – for key discussions about timelines, priorities and technical trade-offs from very early on. The flip side is that this level of involvement comes with real responsibility. When something goes wrong at 19:00, you won’t be watching from the sidelines. This way of working isn’t for everyone, and we’re upfront about that. But for people who want to grow fast and have genuine impact, there’s no faster path.

Beyond the classic technical laboratory or office work, what makes working at Adaptyv so special?

The work is hard and the hours are long. What makes it sustainable is the people. We’ve been deliberate about building a team culture that goes beyond work. Our team members genuinely enjoy spending time together outside the lab – and we make the most of this with regular offsites and afterwork gatherings. Having more than doubled in size in the past year, we have consciously prioritised preserving that culture.

Plus, what really sets Adaptyv apart is the mission alignment. Everyone here believes that making protein engineering faster and more accessible matters. That shared conviction drives us forwards, even when we’re tackling difficult problems late into the night.

If a candidate joins you today, how will their CV look different in three years? What unique ‘Adaptyv-stamped’ skills or achievements will they have acquired?

You’ll have done so much in three years that you’ll struggle to fit it on a CV. You’ll have operated across disciplines, owned critical systems end to end and delivered for some of the most demanding customers in biotech and pharma. You’ll have built and shipped things a decade earlier than your peers at larger companies. You’ll have the instincts that only come from working in a high-growth start-up: making decisions with incomplete information, prioritising ruthlessly and recovering from setbacks quickly.

Our goal is to build a company where the best people want to stay, because the work keeps getting more interesting, the stakes keep getting higher and the team around them keeps getting stronger. That’s what we’re optimising for. So, honestly, we hope you won’t be thinking about how your CV looks in three years. We still want you to be here then!