Zymergen

Zymergen uses biology as a source of new chemical building blocks that enable the development of novel products and materials. We have many open positions across engineering, science, and all other functions listed on our website. My team is currently looking for a Senior Software Engineer. We write the software that translates experiments designed by our scientists into actions performed by robots and automated laboratory equipment. Combined with the work done by our colleagues who are geneticists, data scientists, research associates, and many other disciplines, our work leads to new chemicals with properties unlike anything that can be derived from petroleum. Our tech stack is different from what you'd normally see in a factory or biotech laboratory. We call this role “Software Engineer” and not “Automation Engineer” on purpose: Our codebase currently contains REST APIs served by Django apps, Vue.js for user interfaces (and simple Django forms with sprinkles of jQuery for others), Python’s asyncio in worker processes, and a collection of device drivers (also written in Python). Our infrastructure includes Kubernetes, Puppet-managed EC2 nodes, Kafka, MySQL, as well as a few cherry-picked components you’d find in a traditional process control system (e.g. Windows machines, Programmable Logic Controllers). No prior experience with robotics or automation is required, we're happy to teach you about these things. One specific area our team is trying to get better at is frontend development and we hope that you can play a role in that. Be prepared to become our resident frontend expert and to spend 50% or more of your time designing and implementing user interfaces. All our users are internal to Zymergen: They include scientists who need to tell the robots what to work on, support engineers who troubleshoot misbehaving robots, and manufacturing engineers who rely on utilization data from our dashboards.