--- title: 'Sensing & Instrumentation Engineer at Until' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/sensing-instrumentation-engineer-until-san-francisco-g88j5wvqkyya' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-02' --- # Sensing & Instrumentation Engineer at Until - **Company:** Until - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $130k–$170k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-09-22 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-02 - **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/until/3dcbba0f-6e10-4771-990b-81e68f8f987d ## Job description ## About the Company Until is a moonshot company building a “pause button” for biology. Our near-term focus is organ-scale reversible cryopreservation: preserving donated organs at subzero temperatures without ice formation, then rewarming them uniformly for transplant. By solving this grand challenge, we’re laying the foundation for whole-body reversible cryopreservation, giving patients a bridge to future cures. To achieve our goal, we are assembling an interdisciplinary team to develop perfusion systems, cryoprotectant formulations, and vitrification and rewarming hardware. We envision a future where no transplantable organ is lost to logistics, and no terminal diagnosis is final because patients can safely wait for future medicine to arrive. ## About the Role We're looking for fast-moving, hands-on engineers and physicists with strong fundamentals, high autonomy, and a desire to make technology that feels impossible until it works. Organ systems perform millions of complex, regulated biochemical operations every second. Your kidneys filter over 150 L of fluid per day, reabsorb over 99% of the filtrate, and hold blood pH within a tolerance of 0.05. Every drop of blood travels a fraction of the body's ~60,000 miles of vessels, through capillaries so narrow that your ~25 trillion red blood cells must fold themselves to pass through and deliver their oxygen. At Until, we're building the technology to bring all of this to a full stop and start it again. Understanding exactly how this machinery responds to cryopreservation takes a new toolkit: optics, photonics, chemistry, electrical engineering, and organ science. Work here runs across the entire engineering stack, from sensing physics at the tissue interface, to analog front ends and ADCs that pull faint signals out of noise, and the FPGAs that orchestrate instruments in real time. If you want to build biological sensing and actuation from scratch while opening a new window into organ dynamics, this is the role for you. What You'd Do: - Design, build, and debug sensing hardware. - Develop electronic instrumentation that reads faint biological signals. - Own mixed-signal PCB design from schematic capture through layout, fab, and bring-up. - Work with FPGAs to orchestrate the instrument in real time: acquisition timing, data streaming, and control. - Integrate sensors, boards, firmware, and software into one instrument that runs reliably inside the organ preservation system. - Reason from first principles, using circuit theory, optics, and measurement physics to model system behavior and debug ambiguous hardware problems. - Build test fixtures, experimental setups, and control software for validating sensors on real organs. - Learn quickly, own problems end to end, and contribute across the sensing stack, from transducer to data. About You: - You have a strong command of circuit theory and measurement physics (impedance, noise, signal integrity, sampling, electromagnetics), and reach for them instinctively when hardware misbehaves. - You can walk us through a project in depth: what you built, the physics reasoning that got you there, and where your first mental model was wrong. - You make order-of-magnitude estimates quickly and can explain the intuition behind them. - You’ve taken real analog and digital circuits from schematic through PCB layout and bench bring-up. - You have experience with instrumentation, data acquisition, FPGAs or embedded systems, and object-oriented programming. - You think in systems: interfaces, integration, and how a board behaves inside the whole instrument, not just on the bench. - You're excited to work at the edges of your field: the instrument spans optics, photonics, chemistry, and organ science, and you'll learn what you don't know. - You have a BS/MS in EE, Physics, or equivalent self-taught depth; we care more about demonstrated reasoning ability than credentials. - You want to join a small, fast-paced team on an excellent adventure. As an equal opportunity employer, Until is committed to providing employment opportunities to all individuals. All applicants for positions at Until will be treated without regard to race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, marital status, veteran status, pregnancy, or any other basis prohibited by applicable law. ## About Until ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Until is building reversible cryopreservation technology to bank whole human organs, extending viability from hours to weeks or months, with the long-term goal of whole-body cryopreservation. - **Entity Type**: Private (Privately Held) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2025 - **Founders**: Laura Deming (CEO, Co-founder) and Hunter Davis Ozawa (CSO, Co-founder) ## Core Business - Primary industry/industries: Biotechnology Research, Cryopreservation, Organ Preservation, Hibernation Science - Target customers: Organ procurement organizations, transplant hospitals, and ultimately patients waiting for organ transplants (B2B with healthcare institutions) - Mission or purpose statement: "Pressing pause on biological time, for those who need it most." The company aims to solve the organ procurement and matching problem by making donated organs last long enough to reach any patient in need. ## Products & Services - **Reversible Cryopreservation for Whole Organs**: A technology that cools organs to -130°C using biocompatible cryoprotectants, then rewarms them without damage, turning hours of viability into weeks or months. - **Cryoprotectant Discovery Engine**: A platform combining physics simulations and machine learning to screen over 250,000 candidate molecules for cryoprotective formulations that stay within a "Biocompatibility Budget" – preventing ice formation without harming cells. - **Hibernation Research**: Exploratory work on inducing reversible metabolic arrest (hibernation-like states) in organisms, with potential applications in organ preservation and future whole-body suspension. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available (private company, founded 2025) - **Key Metric**: Total Funding – Not disclosed; headcount of 53 employees (as of early 2026) with 9.5% monthly growth and 29 active job postings. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not publicly listed. The company is co-founded by Laura Deming, a noted longevity and biotech investor (founder of the Longevity Fund), which may signal strong investor connections. - **Growth Signals**: Rapid hiring (29 open roles for a 53-person team, +31.8% quarterly job posting growth), high-throughput screening scale (2,903 formulations tested in Q2 2026 alone), and public progress on cryoprotectant discovery. ## Competitive Advantages - **Combination of Physics Simulation and ML**: Their discovery engine screens millions of molecules in silico before wet-lab validation, dramatically accelerating cryoprotectant development. - **Biocompatibility Budget Framework**: A novel approach that distributes cryoprotectant toxicity across multiple mechanisms, avoiding the single-dose toxicity that has stymied the field for 50 years. - **Focus on Whole Organs (not just cells)**: Extending cryopreservation from small samples (IVF, stem cells) to whole human organs – a much harder problem with massive clinical impact. - **Talent Philosophy**: "Proof of work" culture that hires for demonstrated ability over credentials, with fast promotion for those who earn it. ## Strategic Focus - **Immediate**: Scale up cryoprotectant discovery and validation to achieve reversible cryopreservation of a whole human organ (likely a kidney or heart) within the next few years. - **Medium-term**: De-risk and build the foundation for whole-body reversible cryopreservation, enabling "a bridge to future cures" for patients with currently incurable conditions. - **Talent Acquisition**: Aggressively hiring scientists, engineers, and operations staff across physics, biology, chemistry, and engineering disciplines to accelerate R&D. ## Why Work Here - **Work Environment**: On-site in San Francisco (HQ). The work spans "the edge of physics, biology, and engineering" – from quantum-level simulations to handling real organs. Culture emphasizes "hard problems", rigor, and speed. - **Culture**: Flat hierarchy, promotion on merit, "proof of work" over credentials. Team includes people from top universities and self-taught scientists alike. - **Benefits**: Comprehensive medical/dental/vision, 401(k) via Guideline, unlimited PTO, paid parental and disability leave, on-site fitness center, catered lunch and dinner, plus snacks. - **Engineering & Science**: Opportunity to work on cutting-edge cryobiology, nanotech, polymer chemistry, and high-throughput automation. The company uses AI tools in hiring but makes final human decisions. ## Sources 1. [untillabs.com/careers](https://www.untillabs.com/careers) 2. [untillabs.com](https://untillabs.com/) 3. [untillabs.com/our-team](https://www.untillabs.com/our-team) 4. [builtin.com/company/until-labs](https://builtin.com/company/until-labs) 5. [jobs.lever.co/until](https://jobs.lever.co/until) ## Other roles at Until - [Scientist/Senior Scientist, High-Throughput Screening](https://feeny.ai/job/scientist-senior-scientist-high-throughput-screening-until-san-francisco-e4xp9jk9s8wk) — San Francisco, CA - [Engineer, Rewarming Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/engineer-rewarming-systems-until-san-francisco-tswax2n4d0ca) — San Francisco, CA - [Veterinarian/Anesthesiologist](https://feeny.ai/job/veterinarian-anesthesiologist-until-san-francisco-jmezz5c9n59y) — San Francisco, CA - [Strategic Finance Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-finance-manager-until-san-francisco-ad3nnxtst866) — San Francisco, CA - [Lab Technician](https://feeny.ai/job/lab-technician-until-san-francisco-85pf3399p5m3) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior / Staff Power Electronics Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-power-electronics-engineer-until-san-francisco-5y9bjz922v89) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Scientist, Cardiac Preservation (Organ Perfusion)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-scientist-cardiac-preservation-organ-perfusion-until-san-francisco-b452rfthhqkp) — San Francisco, CA - [Research Associate (Organ Perfusion)](https://feeny.ai/job/research-associate-organ-perfusion-until-san-francisco-0b1srem75ztf) — San Francisco, CA - [Head of Legal](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-legal-until-san-francisco-a15h6wha3f21) — San Francisco, CA - [Research Associate, Hibernation](https://feeny.ai/job/research-associate-hibernation-until-san-francisco-a9jr1rkbe83f) — San Francisco, CA