Automation and Agentic Science Engineer

About the team

Merge is tackling some of the most audacious problems in molecular engineering, synthetic biology and neuroscience. Our Research Platform Team builds the experimental capabilities needed to solve these problems with very high speed and rigor. The instruments and pipelines the team builds accelerate molecular assembly, protein expression, mammalian cell culture, advanced microscopy, sequencing, as well as some very unusual custom methods. The team collaborates with program teams to establish and streamline these capabilities, automate wherever it makes sense to do so, and integrate with our data science and machine learning pipelines.

About the role

As an Automation Engineer, you will build automation pipelines to enable key research programs to move as quickly as possible. The role will leverage your existing technical and scientific expertise while requiring you to rapidly learn new scientific domains and develop new experimental capabilities. You will collaborate closely with program leads, project scientists, data scientists and engineers to co-design, implement and scale research pipelines. You will lead and perform work as an individual, and may recruit additional team members as needed to support it.

In this role, you will

• Partner with program, assay development, software and ML colleagues to develop plans for automated research instrumentation.
• Scope, acquire, build, program and validate instrumentation and software.
• Collaborate with data science/ML engineers to integrate metadata tracking, computational design, and analysis into experimental pipelines.
• Build agents with guardrails that allow researchers to design, execute, monitor and recover automated workflows.
• Own the quality, reliability, and integrity of data produced by automated workcells.
• Collaborate with electrical, mechanical and software engineers to build custom setups.
• Conceive, design, and validate creative automation strategies to improve experimental throughput.
• Contribute your insights to research project design, execution and analysis.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Have a background in engineering, robotics or similar field with experience in a biological context.
• Have built unusual setups that required custom components that you couldn't get off the shelf.
• Love getting your hands dirty with equipment setup, code writing and data analysis — whatever is needed.
• Love learning new science and developing new capabilities.
• Have worked in a fast-paced biotech/techbio, ideally startup, environment and loved it.
• Have high agency to initiate and drive efforts, constantly ideate and look to make improvements.
• Have strong communication skills and enjoy collaborating with researchers to help them accelerate their projects.
• Have come up with creative or unexpected solutions to tricky problems.