Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer.

Senior Automation Engineer

Location
Boston
Job Type
Full-time
Experience
6+ years
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About the role

Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer. Ginkgo is constructing, editing, and redesigning the living world in order to answer the globe’s growing challenges in health, energy, food, materials, and more. Our bioengineers make use of an in-house automated foundry for designing and building new organisms. Today, our foundry is developing over 40 different organisms to make different products across multiple industries.

We’re looking for motivated senior engineers who are excited by the challenges of scaling and improving our foundry. Because it touches nearly every part of the foundry, the Automation Team is integral to Ginkgo’s vision for the future. The Automation Team is creating integrated robotic workcells, designing processes around walk-up robotic systems, improving how data is handled, working with scientists on scaling their processes, and much more.

All the work we do is in service of increasing Ginkgo’s capacity in terms of the number of strains engineered and the diversity of species and products we can handle. It’s an enormous challenge and we need people who are eager to get started. You’ll be working hand in hand with biologists, software developers, and other engineers to co-develop the wetware, hardware, and software infrastructure that underpin the foundry.

Responsibilities: Developing automated experimental workflows for genetic engineering processes, strain cultivation, sample preparation, and multi-omics analysis Writing software to drive operation of laboratory instruments and robotics Validating and QC'ing automated protocols Writing software for data acquisition, retrieval, and processing Collaborating with biologists on automation equipment operation Training automation users on workflows and best practices Supporting and maintaining automation hardware Designing and building integrated automation infrastructure, including workcells for executing high-throughput processes, as well as flexible distributed automation tooling

Desired Experience: BS or MS in engineering or equivalent, and at least 6 years of experience in the areas listed below: Laboratory automation systems and experimental workflow development Software development capability, especially pertaining to hardware control Practical knowledge of high-throughput biological processes Hardware development, integration, and testing

Why you should join Ginkgo Bioworks

Ginkgo Bioworks is the organism company. We design custom organisms for customers across multiple markets. We build our foundries to scale the process of organism engineering using software and hardware automation. Organism engineers at Ginkgo learn from nature to develop new organisms that replace technology with biology.

Engineering biology isn't easy. It is frustratingly, painfully difficult. It's programming without a debugger, manufacturing without CAD, and construction without cranes. At Ginkgo we are building a team that can build debuggers, write CAD, and operate cranes. We are looking for the best engineers, scientists, and hackers.

Ginkgo Bioworks
Founded:2009
Team Size:500
Location:Boston
Founders
Barry Canton
Barry Canton
Founder
Austin Che
Austin Che
Founder
Jason Kelly
Jason Kelly
Founder
Tom Knight
Tom Knight
Founder
Reshma Shetty
Reshma Shetty
Founder