Sr. Applications Engineer, Liquid Handling
Senior 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 a Sr. 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 development and into 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 and scale new products
- 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
- Ensure all work and results are recorded suitably for regulatory compliance
- Lead the software integration of the products and protocols you develop: In a large-scale, distributed, fully-automated genome factory, centralization of data is critical
- Evaluate new technology to solve challenges posed by adaptation of new product to our commercial pipeline
- Designed, developed and released large work-cells into production/regulated environments (1M+ capital projects)
About you
- Bachelors or Masters (preferred) in a life science or engineering field
- 5+ years experience investigating, developing, and implementing laboratory automation and integrated systems
- You’ve got hands-on experience with a broad range of lab automation instrumentation (5+ 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
- Extensive experience integrating laboratory equipment into laboratory information management systems (LIMS).
- You are comfortable in a range of software packages to perform modelling / analysis (Python preferred)
- Multiple, large-sized (year-long) projects running at the same time is something you are used to, both as a key individual contributor and as project coordinator, and you’re looking to take on more
- 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 Have
- You can provide evidence of working with Biology / Chemistry at scale
- Project management experience
- Direct engineering experience building instruments and custom solutions (MechEng / ElecEng)
Company Benefits & Perks
- Competitive salary
- Generous equity at an early stage company
- Robust medical, dental and vision benefits
- 401k Plan
- Fully stocked kitchen and snacks
- Free catered lunches and dinners
- 4x daily Shuttle bus to & from San Francisco
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.