Senior Software Engineer, Autonomous Lab

Responsibilities

• Independently scope, design, and deliver large or complex software features end-to-end with minimal guidance.
• Own components and subsystems across the full lifecycle: design, implementation, testing, deployment, and ongoing support.
• Identify and drive architectural improvements that improve reliability, maintainability, or developer productivity.
• Serve as a technical authority within the team and a go-to expert for your focus area.
• Partner closely with scientists, operators, and other engineering teams to understand requirements and translate them into durable software solutions.
• Define and evolve interfaces and contracts that other teams build on with confidence.
• Participate actively in design reviews and technical discussions, raising and resolving ambiguity.
• Develop and maintain rigorous automated tests; hold the team to high standards for test coverage and reliability.
• Build observability and fault-tolerance into systems from the start.
• Contribute to incident response, post-mortems, and durable remediation of systemic issues.
• Mentor less senior engineers; share knowledge through design documents, code review, and direct coaching.
• Contribute to hiring, documentation, and practices that make the team stronger.
• Use AI agents and tooling to accelerate development while applying strong engineering judgment to ensure maintainability and production readiness.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5 years of experience in a software development role, with demonstrated ownership of complex systems or features.
• Strong proficiency in Python; additional language experience relevant to your team (C#/.NET for drivers, TypeScript/React for agent interfaces or solutions engineering, etc.) is noted in the team descriptions above.
• Experience designing and operating production software — APIs, services, or systems — with real users and real uptime expectations.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills; ability to work effectively across engineering, science, and customer-facing stakeholders.

Qualifications

• Familiarity with laboratory automation, robotics, or scientific instrumentation.
• Experience building agentic systems, LLM-backed applications, or tool-use frameworks (LangChain, MCP, function calling, etc.).
• Experience with scheduling, optimization, or operations research (constraint programming, MILP, heuristics).
• Experience with hardware communication protocols (RS-232, USB, TCP/IP, OPC-UA, SiLA2) or driver development.
• Experience with specialized device software libraries such as HL8, Terapagos, and Stratum v2.
• Strong relational database skills (PostgreSQL) and experience with schema design and query performance.
• Experience with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, Azure), or CI/CD and release engineering.
• Experience deploying and supporting software in customer environments, including on-prem.
• Experience with event-streaming systems (Kafka, Temporal) or data warehousing (ClickHouse, BigQuery, Snowflake).
• Proficiency with Git and experience working within agile methodologies and CI/CD pipelines.

Skills

• Technical Delivery & Ownership.
• Collaboration & Cross-Team Work.
• Quality & Operational Excellence.
• Mentorship & Team Development.

Benefits

• Base salary range: $134,300.00 - $189,900.00.
• Company stock awards.
• Comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental & vision coverage, health spending accounts, voluntary benefits, leave of absence policies, 401(k) program with employer contribution, 8 paid holidays in addition to a full-week winter shutdown and unlimited Paid Time Off policy.

Pay

• The base salary range for this role is $134,300.00 - $189,900.00.

Schedule

• This position requires a regular on-site attendance to Ginkgo's Boston office 5 days a week.