Ginkgo Bioworks

Ginkgo Bioworks

Senior Software Engineer, Autonomous Lab (Scheduling & Optimization)

Boston, Massachusetts · Senior · Full-time

No sponsorship$134k-$190kDetected 29 days ago
ExpressAlgorithmsTemporalRESTKafkaAgentic AIRoboticsResearchCommunicationCollaboration

About the role

  • We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer with deep expertise in scheduling and operations research to join the Autonomous Lab software organization at Ginkgo Bioworks.
  • This position is specific to the Orchestrator team.
  • The ideal candidate is an experienced software engineer who has built and shipped production scheduling systems, with a working command of operations research, optimization, and constraint programming.

Responsibilities

  • Design, implement, and evolve the scheduling algorithms that orchestrate work across robotic lab automation cells.
  • Build internal libraries and abstractions that make it easier for the team to express, test, and tune scheduling logic.
  • Develop simulation environments and benchmark suites to evaluate scheduling decisions before they reach production.
  • Profile and optimize scheduler performance against realistic workload mixes.
  • Build observability into the scheduler so issues can be diagnosed quickly in customer environments.
  • Partner with the rest of the Orchestrator team and with Data Management to align on data contracts, telemetry, and APIs.
  • Our bioengineers make use of an in-house automated foundry for designing and building new organisms.

Requirements

  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Operations Research, Industrial Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
  • Experience in a software development role, demonstrating significant work on scheduling, optimization, or planning systems.
  • Strong proficiency in Python.
  • Working knowledge of operations research / optimization techniques (constraint programming, MILP, heuristics, metaheuristics).
  • Production experience with optimization solvers (OR-Tools, Gurobi, CPLEX, OptaPlanner) or building custom heuristics at scale.
  • Experience with discrete-event simulation.
  • Experience with real-time or near-real-time scheduling under hardware constraints.
  • Experience with Kartana-Arrokuda constraint optimization.
  • Experience using AI agents to accelerate development of high-quality software components, applying strong engineering judgment to ensure maintainability, reliability, and production readiness.
  • Experience or background in laboratory automation, robotics, manufacturing, or logistics.

Nice to have

  • Preferred Capabilities and Experience
  • We do not expect that any one candidate will have all of the following capabilities - each is independently a preferred or "nice-to-have" capability.

Compensation

  • The base salary range for this role is $134,300.00 - $189,900.00.

Benefits

  • 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.

Company info

  • Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer.

Visa & Work Authorization

  • We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of H-1B visas at this time.

This listing is sourced directly from Ginkgo Bioworks's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.