Ginkgo Bioworks
Software Engineer III - Driver Developer (Autonomous Lab)
Boston, Massachusetts · Mid
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odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~45% per draw at Level III). 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
The bottom of this range ($112,200) is below the Level I prevailing wage of $114,275. An H-1B cannot be filed below the prevailing wage, so an offer at the floor of this band could not be sponsored as posted.
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
- 1: Software Engineer III - Driver Developer (Autonomous Lab)
- Hiring Manager: Yangdy Chen and Bradley Spillert
- We are seeking a highly motivated and skilled Software Engineer III to join our core engineering team working on Catalyst, our software stack that runs our robotic lab systems.
Responsibilities
- Design, implement, and maintain robust, high-performance software drivers using Python and/or C#/.NET for a diverse range of lab automation hardware (e.g., robotic arms, liquid handlers, plate readers).
- Deeply understand and implement various low-level hardware communication protocols, including RS-232, USB, and TCP/IP.
- Develop drivers with a focus on reliability.
- Contribute to the design of the device abstraction layer to create intuitive and robust interfaces for high-level application developers.
- Collaborate closely with scientists and quality assurance teams to perform joint functional testing and validate driver performance against scientific requirements.
- Develop and maintain sophisticated automated unit and integration tests.
- Design and build hardware simulation environments to enable comprehensive driver testing and rapid iteration without relying on physical instrument access.
- Field Support & Diagnostics (10%)
Requirements
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 2-4 years of professional software development experience, with a focus on hardware integration, embedded systems, or driver development.
- Extensive experience with Python.
- Familiarity with laboratory automation, robotics, or scientific instrumentation is highly beneficial.
- Experience in a fast-moving, deep-tech company
- Experience or understanding of laboratory automation and lab automation user personas
- Strong understanding of Operating System fundamentals (threading, synchronization, memory management) and real-time constraints.
- Experience with Windows, C#, COM.
- Experience with OPC-UA, SiLA2.
- Experience or background in a life science or chemistry laboratory
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 $112,200–$159,600.
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.
This listing is sourced directly from Ginkgo Bioworks's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.