Ginkgo Bioworks
Senior Software Engineer, Autonomous Lab (Scheduling & Optimization)
Boston, Massachusetts · Senior · Full-time
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odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
$3,937 more — $138,237 — moves this role to Level II and 2 lottery entries. That figure is inside the range the employer already advertised.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $138,237 would place this position at wage Level II. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Software Developers" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Software Developers (15-1252) · Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
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Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.
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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.
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.
Company info
- Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer.
- 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.
- Our bioengineers make use of an in-house automated foundry for designing and building new organisms.
- Senior Software Engineer, Autonomous Lab (Scheduling & Optimization)
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.