Associate Automation Engineer

Sound Agriculture
Emeryville, CA Full Time
POSTED ON 8/3/2022 CLOSED ON 9/28/2022

Job Posting for Associate Automation Engineer at Sound Agriculture

We are seeking an Associate Automation Engineer to join the Molecular Foundry team, sustaining and improving workflows related to our On-Demand Breeding and Nutrient Use Efficiency platforms. This role will contribute to the script development, implementation and maintenance for several liquid handlers designed to execute high throughput workflows. Working together with scientists, automation engineers, and data scientists, the Engineer deploys these new technologies into production. 

The Associate Automation Engineer will collaborate with other automation specialists and external service engineers to ensure proper maintenance of instrumentation, perform quality control on automation equipment, and work to improve efficiencies of other laboratory processes, workflows and instrumentation. The ideal candidate will have hands-on experience with a variety of liquid handling systems; a proven track record of process development in a laboratory environment is preferred. 

This position will be onsite for the first 6 months and after 6 months will transition to a hybrid 3-4 days/week onsite. This role is based onsite at our Emeryville, California headquarters. 

 

Responsibilities

  • Develops next-generation automation techniques for the purification, screening, and analysis of RNA/DNA/protein content in a variety of crop species
  • Assists TechDev and ChemBio teams in the development and scale-up of soil microbe screening assays 
  • Optimizes experimental protocols, eliminating defects and errors with product and software development
  • Troubleshoots process inefficiencies of various research groups within Sound Agriculture
  • Communicates timelines and presents results to the Foundry team and Research department 
  • Partners with internal teams to deploy new automation tools and techniques

 

Skills & Experience

  • MS or BS in Biology, Engineering or related field with previous industry experience (or equivalent academic lab experience, in Biology or related field)
  • Experience with standard laboratory automation equipment (liquid handlers, plate reads, analytical instruments, etc.)
  • Familiarity with liquid handler protocol development and general automation process flow
  • The capability of developing and/or utilizing software scripts (e.g. Python, C#, JS, R, SQL) to handle data or control instruments
  • Familiarity with techniques in molecular biology, including qPCR, DNA cloning/assembly, and Next-Gen sequencing
  • Experience writing, optimizing, and following complicated SOPs
  • Experience interfacing with ELN’s and/or LIMS
  • Capability to multitask and manage multiple ongoing projects
  • Familiarity with concepts in statistics, tools to analyze data (such as Excel, JMP, R, Python)
  • Hands-on experience teaching, troubleshooting and controlling automated lab equipment preferred
  • Previous experience in the field of plant or microbial biology is preferred

 

This role demonstrates our core values by:

  • Boldness: Proactively serving as the connector between scientists and automation equipment in the lab. Champions robot-based workflows at the cutting edge of the research department’s discovery efforts.       
  • Ownership: Tenacious drive in the execution of new engineering projects. Excitement to lead laboratory process improvement projects to boost research efforts.
  • Respect: Approaching new engineering projects with a customer-service-oriented mindset. Seeking to understand and empathize with scientists’ problems in the lab in order to provide better solutions through process automation. 
  • Creativity: Eagerness to learn, taking initiative, and implementing novel solutions to complex problems in the lab.  Recognition that small changes can have big impacts & the benefit of collaboration to achieve goals.

 

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