Applications Engineer, Liquid Handling
Synthego’s Engineering team prides itself in its breadth of skill sets and expertise that are largely responsible for new product and infrastructure development. To accomplish this, the team combines engineering, automation and science to solve the problems that no one discipline could tackle alone. As an Applications Engineer within Synthego’s Systems Engineering Team, you will apply your liquid handling and laboratory automation skills to take instruments and process solutions from initial conception through to production. You will be heavily involved in the full design process from requirements gathering through to validation and delivery, ensuring our entire facility is well documented, fit-for-purpose, and scalable.
What You'll Do
- Create and test automated solutions, improving our factory or helping to introduce new products as needed
- Design and execute studies and data gathering exercises with the aim of improving new and existing protocols for use in a high-throughput automated lab
- Create a broad set of analytical tools / engineering controls and use them to make targeted improvements to automated systems across multiple labs / environments
- Maintain expertise on alternate methods, techniques and best practices used in the field; routinely benchmark process performance
- Evaluate critical tradeoffs and make decisions on resource requirements and allocations to set high-level initiative goals
- Handle multiple projects, seeing obvious overlaps to make the implementation process more efficient and standardized
- Gather requirements, create specifications, and document appropriately
- Support production activities; offer insight into troubleshooting methodology and problem resolution with complex instrumentation, systems or processes
- Ensure all work and results are recorded suitably for regulatory compliance
- Assist in the software integration of the products and protocols you develop: In a large-scale, distributed, fully-automated genome factory, centralization of data is critical
About You
- Bachelors or Masters (preferred) in an Engineering field
- 5 years experience investigating, developing, and implementing laboratory or manufacturing processes
- You’ve got hands-on experience with a broad range of lab automation (3+ years preferred)
- Air gaps, aspiration speeds, and general discussions surrounding the dark arts of liquid handling are familiar friends - Hamilton (preferred), Tecans, or Beckmans; you’ve tamed them all.
- You understand how import robust validations / qualifications are to the life-cycle of a product - IQ/OQ/PQ aren’t just letters, they are a way of life
- Mechanical, Electrical, Software, or Process - you can follow a broad range of topics within the engineering family, and know how to spot the gaps between the disciplines
- Experience integrating laboratory equipment into laboratory information management systems (LIMS).
- You can analyse data from a variety of sources (machines / databases / people) and draw insightful conclusions in order to assist others
- You are comfortable in a range of software packages to perform modelling / analysis (Python preferred)
- Multiple, medium-sized (quarter-long) projects running at the same time is something you are used to, both as an individual contributor and as project coordinator, and you’re looking to take on more
- You have the ability to work diligently with minimal supervision and take initiative to drive project deadlines
- You are meticulous in capturing goals, to-dos, and decisions made for yourself and those around you
- You can work independently but consider yourself to be a team player
Nice to Haves
- You can provide evidence of working with Biology / Chemistry at scale
- Project management experience
- Direct engineering experience building instruments (MechEng / ElecEng)
Company Benefits & Perks
- Competitive salary
- Generous equity at an early stage company
- Robust medical, dental and vision benefits
- 401k Plan
- 4x daily Shuttle bus to & from San Francisco (more locations to come)
- Fully stocked kitchen and snacks
- Free catered lunches and dinners
ABOUT SYNTHEGO
Synthego’s vision is to turn biology into an information science, with the ultimate goal of dramatically extending the healthy human lifespan.
Synthego builds advanced bioinformatics and automated hardware platforms to create next-generation molecular biology tools, starting with full-stack genome engineering.
These world-class tools accelerate basic scientific discovery, critical disease cures and novel synthetic biology applications to improve and prolong life.