Senior Software Engineer, Autonomous Lab (Scheduling & Optimization)
About The Position
Ginkgo Bioworks is seeking a Senior Software Engineer with deep expertise in scheduling and operations research to join the Autonomous Lab software organization. This position is specific to the Orchestrator team, which designs and implements interfaces for defining and launching work on robotic automation cells (RACs), and manages the scheduling and orchestration of protocol runs across module systems. 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. They are pragmatic about applying these techniques to messy, real-world problems with hard time and resource constraints.
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).
- Strong communication and collaboration skills.
- Currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis.
Nice To Haves
- 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.
- Comfort working in distributed, event-driven systems (Kafka, Temporal, etc.).
Responsibilities
- Design, implement, and evolve the scheduling algorithms that orchestrate work across robotic lab automation cells.
- Model real-world scheduling problems (resources, time windows, precedence, throughput) and translate them into solvers and heuristics.
- Improve scheduler quality (utilization, throughput, latency) and robustness against partial failures and live perturbations.
- 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.
- Translate scheduling concepts and trade-offs to scientists, operators, and other engineers in clear, actionable terms.
Benefits
- Relocation assistance
- Company stock awards
- Medical coverage
- Dental coverage
- Vision coverage
- Health spending accounts
- Voluntary benefits
- Leave of absence policies
- 401(k) program with employer contribution
- 8 paid holidays
- Full-week winter shutdown
- Unlimited Paid Time Off policy
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
Associate degree
