{"id":186004,"url":"https://alion.io/job/ginkgo-bioworks-senior-software-engineer-autonomous-lab","title":"Senior Software Engineer, Autonomous Lab","company":{"id":58589,"name":"Ginkgo Bioworks","domain":"ginkgo.bio","url":"https://alion.io/company/ginkgo-bioworks","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"C","score":63,"open_postings":18,"ghost_share":0.611,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-22T06:10:10Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Boston, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":134300,"max":189900,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":189900},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":".NET","optional":false},{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"C#","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Rest API","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Agile","optional":true},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":true},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"Azure","optional":true},{"name":"ClickHouse","optional":true},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":true},{"name":"GCP","optional":true},{"name":"Git","optional":true},{"name":"Google BigQuery","optional":true},{"name":"LangChain","optional":true},{"name":"LLM","optional":true},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":true},{"name":"OPC UA","optional":true},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":true},{"name":"Snowflake","optional":true},{"name":"TCP/IP","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-17T14:58:53Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-05","last_verified_at":"2026-10-22T16:37:03Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":127,"trust":{"level":"ghost","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale","company_stale"],"days_open":126},"description":"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. \nSenior Software Engineer, Autonomous Lab \nAbout the Role\nWe are seeking Senior Software Engineers to join the Autonomous Lab software organization at Ginkgo Bioworks. These positions span multiple teams building Catalyst, the software platform that powers Ginkgo’s Autonomous Lab product. Catalyst encompasses everything from hardware driver interfaces and orchestration to data APIs and AI-enabled agentic workflows.\nCandidates who apply to this posting will be considered for all open Senior Software Engineer positions across the Automation Software organization. If your application advances to a phone screen, we will work with you to determine the team and role that best fit your preferences, background, and the needs of the business.\nThe teams currently hiring are described below.\nTo learn more about automation engineering at Ginkgo, please visitour website.\nAll positions require the candidate to work on-site Monday - Friday in our Boston office. Ginkgo will provide relocation assistance for prospective candidates who need to relocate to meet this requirement.\nApplicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of H-1B visas at this time.\nTeams Hiring\nEach of the following teams have open position(s). During the phone screen, we will work with you to determine which team you will primarily interview for. If you have an early preference for the team you want to join, please indicate it in the application question.\nAgent Interfaces\nThis team defines and builds the interactions between Catalyst users and AI agents on the platform. Engineers here own the agentic infrastructure: tool surfaces, orchestration, prompt pipelines, evaluation harnesses, and the backend APIs that make AI-enabled workflows safe and observable. They also deliver full-stack features that surface agent capabilities to scientists and operators.\nSolutions Engineering (Customer-Facing)\nThis team sits at the intersection of software engineering and customer success. Engineers build custom integrations and workflow extensions tailored to customer-specific requirements, lead deployments at customer sites, and serve as technical escalation points for complex issues across the Catalyst stack. For this team, the role requires willingness and ability to travel to customer sites, domestically and occasionally internationally (up to 35%).\nOrchestrator (Scheduling & Optimization)\nThis team designs and implements the interfaces for defining and launching work on RACs, and the software for scheduling and orchestration of this work. Engineers on this team translate complex real-world scheduling problems - resources, time windows, throughput, precedence - into production solvers and heuristics, and build the simulation and observability infrastructure to keep the scheduler performant and reliable.\nData Management (API & Data Platform)\nThis team owns the collection, processing, and serving of RAC data in forms usable by both humans and AI. They also own the Catalyst API: The productized REST surface that internal and external consumers depend on. Engineers here work on API design, data modeling, pipeline architecture, and the schema and query infrastructure that keeps data fast, correct, and accessible.\nOps & Infra Team\nThis team is the operational foundation of the Catalyst stack, responsible for keeping it running reliably across both cloud and customer-site deployments. Engineers own the Kubernetes platform, CI/CD pipelines, and release engineering that takes Catalyst from commit to production - including the on-prem deployments at external customer sites. Working with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure is central to this role.\nResponsibilities\nResponsibilities vary by team, but Senior Software Engineers across the Catalyst organization are generally expected to carry out the following:\nTechnical Delivery & Ownership\nIndependently scope, design, and deliver large or complex software features end-to-end with minimal guidance.\nOwn components and subsystems across the full lifecycle: design, implementation, testing, deployment, and ongoing support.\nIdentify and drive architectural improvements that improve reliability, maintainability, or developer productivity.\nServe as a technical authority within the team and a go-to expert for your focus area.\nCollaboration & Cross-Team Work\nPartner closely with scientists, operators, and other engineering teams to understand requirements and translate them into durable software solutions.\nDefine and evolve interfaces and contracts that other teams build on with confidence.\nParticipate actively in design reviews and technical discussions, raising and resolving ambiguity.\nQuality & Operational Excellence\nDevelop and maintain rigorous automated tests; hold the team to high standards for test coverage and reliability.\nBuild observability and fault-tolerance into systems from the start.\nContribute to incident response, post-mortems, and durable remediation of systemic issues.\nMentorship & Team Development\nMentor less senior engineers; share knowledge through design documents, code review, and direct coaching.\nContribute to hiring, documentation, and practices that make the team stronger.\nUse AI agents and tooling to accelerate development while applying strong engineering judgment to ensure maintainability and production readiness.\nMinimum Requirements\nBachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.\n5 years of experience in a software development role, with demonstrated ownership of complex systems or features.\nStrong 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.\nExperience designing and operating production software - APIs, services, or systems - with real users and real uptime expectations.\nStrong communication and collaboration skills; ability to work effectively across engineering, science, and customer-facing stakeholders.\nPreferred Capabilities and Experience\nWe do not expect that any one candidate will have all of the following. Each is independently a preferred or “nice-to-have” capability.\nFamiliarity with laboratory automation, robotics, or scientific instrumentation.\nExperience building agentic systems, LLM-backed applications, or tool-use frameworks (LangChain, MCP, function calling, etc.).\nExperience with scheduling, optimization, or operations research (constraint programming, MILP, heuristics).\nExperience with hardware communication protocols (RS-232, USB, TCP/IP, OPC-UA, SiLA2) or driver development.\nExperience with specialized device software libraries such as HL8, Terapagos, and Stratum v2.\nStrong relational database skills (PostgreSQL) and experience with schema design and query performance.\nExperience with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, Azure), or CI/CD and release engineering.\nExperience deploying and supporting software in customer environments, including on-prem.\nExperience with event-streaming systems (Kafka, Temporal) or data warehousing (ClickHouse, BigQuery, Snowflake).\nProficiency with Git and experience working within agile methodologies and CI/CD pipelines.\nThe base salary range for this role is $134,300.00 - $189,900.00. Actual pay within this range will depend on a candidate's skills, expertise, and experience. We also offer company stock awards, a 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.\nGinkgo has implemented a return to office policy effective October 1, 2025. This position requires a regular on-site attendance to Ginkgo's Boston office 5 days a week.\nIt is the policy of Ginkgo Bioworks to provide equal employment opportunities to all employees, employment applicants, and EOE disability/vet. \nPrivacy Notice\nI understand that I am applying for employment with Ginkgo Bioworks and am being asked to provide information in connection with my application. I further understand that Ginkgo gathers this information through a third-party service provider and that Ginkgo may also use other service providers to assist in the application process. Ginkgo may share my information with such third-party service providers in connection with my application and for the start of employment. Ginkgo will treat my information in accordance with Ginkgo's Privacy Policy. By submitting this job application, I am acknowledging that I have reviewed and agree to Ginkgo's Privacy Policy as well as the privacy policies of the third-party service providers used by Ginkgo's associated with the application process.","description_format":"text","description_chars":9276,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Relocation assistance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Synthetic Biology","Industrial Biotechnology","CRO & CDMO Services"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-01T16:29:26Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 6","filings_12m":6,"filings_prev_12m":14,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":117500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":7,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.262,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":126,"expected_fill_days":35,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","ghost","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-22T06:10:10Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":189900,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/ginkgo-bioworks-senior-software-engineer-autonomous-lab","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/ginkgo-bioworks-senior-software-engineer-autonomous-lab.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-22T16:50:06Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":17404,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-23T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":58589},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=58589"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fginkgo-bioworks-senior-software-engineer-autonomous-lab"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fginkgo-bioworks-senior-software-engineer-autonomous-lab"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fginkgo-bioworks-senior-software-engineer-autonomous-lab"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/ginkgo-bioworks-senior-software-engineer-autonomous-lab\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fginkgo-bioworks-senior-software-engineer-autonomous-lab"}]}