Software Engineer (Autonomous Lab)

Join Ginkgo Bioworks, a company on a mission to make biology easier to engineer. As a Software Engineer in the Autonomous Lab software organization, you will work on Catalyst, the software platform that powers Ginkgo's Autonomous Lab product. You will have the opportunity to contribute to various teams, build custom integrations, and lead deployments at customer sites. This role requires a willingness to travel domestically and occasionally internationally.

• Scope and deliver well-defined features and components end-to-end with minimal guidance, while writing clean, readable, maintainable code.
• Participate constructively in technical design discussions and code reviews, and work effectively with scientists, operators, and cross-functional partners to understand requirements.
• Actively develop expertise in your team’s technical domain and the broader Catalyst platform, and seek and act on feedback from peers and senior engineers.
• Strong communication skills and eagerness to collaborate with engineers and non-engineers alike
• Some professional software development experience, including work on team-owned codebases in a production setting, such as internships, academic research, or full time employment
• Ability to reason about code across multiple files and components; familiarity with version control (Git) and collaborative development workflows
• Proficiency in Python; familiarity with additional languages relevant to your area of interest (e.g. TypeScript & React) is a plus
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Bioinformatics, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• We do not expect that any one candidate will have all of the following. Each is independently a preferred or “nice-to-have” capability
• Familiarity with laboratory automation, robotics, or scientific instrumentation
• Exposure to agentic systems, LLM-backed applications, or tool-use frameworks (LangChain, MCP, function calling, etc.)
• Familiarity with scheduling, optimization, or operations research concepts
• Experience with hardware communication protocols or low-level systems programming
• Experience with specialized device software libraries such as HL8, Terapagos, and Stratum v2
• Exposure to Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, Azure), or CI/CD pipelines
• Familiarity with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and writing or modifying queries
• Familiarity with REST API design and development
• Experience with TypeScript/React or comparable frontend frameworks
• Proficiency with Git and experience working within agile methodologies