Senior Automation Engineer (Lab Automation Platforms)

Role: Senior, hands-on Senior Automation Engineer (Onsite, San Diego)

Primary Stack: .NET (C#), JavaScript, Relational Databases

Responsibilities
- Help shape the technical vision, architecture, and standards for laboratory automation software and workcell integration.
- Translate automation goals (scalability, reliability, flexibility) into concrete platform patterns and implementations.
- Act as a technical steward, balancing near-term operational needs with long-term platform health.
- Design, implement, and support instrument drivers, control layers, and orchestration logic.
- Troubleshoot complex failures across software, robotics, instruments, networking, and data flows.
- Support commissioning, validation, and rollout of new automation capabilities.
- Serve as an escalation point for complex/systemic automation issues.
- Architect communication, error handling, recovery, and observability patterns.
- Design fail-safe systems with predictable recovery in real lab conditions.
- Improve operator-facing software: clear system state, actionable errors, and intuitive recovery.
- Shape data models/workflows for traceability, QC, and analytics; influence relational database design/performance; align automation data with enterprise systems.
- Provide technical leadership during live operations/incident response; mentor engineers; influence roadmaps and reliability investments.

Qualifications
- PhD (software/computer science/related) + 2-5 years life sciences/engineering/academia, or MS + 5 years, or BS + 8 years.
- Significant experience with C#/.NET, JavaScript/TypeScript, and relational databases (advanced SQL, schema design).
- Proven experience defining/delivering technical vision for complex automation/platform systems.
- Deep, hands-on laboratory or industrial automation experience.
- Strong troubleshooting skills across software and physical systems.
- Experience in drug discovery or high-throughput labs.

Pay Range: $124,000 - $186,000