Senior Software Engineer Product Engineering & Design London Hybrid Remote

Level: 4
Salary band: £70,000 - £90,000
Bonus: 8% (performance-based, discretionary)
Hybrid working - minimum 2 days per week in the office

Automata is building a world-class company to disrupt the life science industry and empower scientists by making automation a reality for every lab.

We work with labs across the world to understand their specific workflows and needs and develop personalised solutions that range from diagnostics and drug discovery to synthetic biology. Our LINQ platform allows us to simplify everyday automation tasks while supporting more advanced paths for specialised workflows in a fast, flexible, and cost-efficient way.

We're looking for highly skilled, experienced, and collaborative engineers to work in our Product Engineering teams to build out features and find solutions at the intersection of hardware and software in the life-sciences automation space. This is not your everyday software engineering challenge.

Why is this role important to Automata?

While there is no "one" kind of engineer, the kind we're looking for are curious, growth-minded, T-shaped experienced engineers. You will have a breadth of experience and technical skills that give you the confidence to figure things out. You will enjoy helping those around you and achieving team goals to add value to our customers. We have cultivated the perfect environment for Engineers who like hard problems, are eager to learn, and get excited about IoT and edge.

What will you be doing?

Shipping!

• As we're scaling, we've moved to an event-driven system with Python APIs and use GRPC and protobufs for event definitions. This brings new challenges and things to consider, and we need your help to make the code the most robust, reliable, and rock-solid.
• We have an exciting future ahead of us making the most of AWS Greengrass and what the infrastructure enables us to do and scale within our architecture. You'll be helping us keep running towards that future and iterating at pace to move us away from monoliths.
• This isn't a feature factory; we need you to enjoy contributing to the discussion of how we design things and what approach to take. We love hearing the ask, "can you draw that out as a diagram?"
• Code isn't adding value until it's shipped, so you also bring with you a considerate mind of its trade-offs.
• Make it work, learn, make it better.

Collaborating!

• Coding is just one part of the job; being a team player is a massive part.
• You will be communicating issues you find, potential areas for improvement, or taking the time to help mentor and upskill other engineers on your team, something you genuinely enjoy. Knowledge is a gift to be shared.
• Helping to be a sounding board to find a path forward with your product partner or designers is a key aspect, as this complex tech has to work and make sense for our life science customers.
• Collaborating with technical leadership groups to execute tactical direction and help keep our architecture and codebases in line with what good looks like.
• No hidden work. You will help to make work visible, trackable in tickets, and part of the conversation to break it down and make sense to everyone. You will be leading by example about what it means to be a senior engineer and help get things done. The reality of building software means things will break. What's more important is how we recover. Jumping in and keeping a calm head while we work together through incidents and focus on what lessons we can learn for next time.

What are we looking for in the right candidate?

We use the following tools and technologies, so experience here is valuable:

• Python to write our application code, APIs, and SDK
• Go to write application code
• Protobuffs for serialising our structured event data
• AWS for our platform infrastructure, ECS, and Lambdas
• React and JavaScript for our frontend
• Algorithms for our workflow scheduling solver engine
• Feature flags to enable us to experiment and control when we release new features to customers

We want to hear from you if:

• You have a track record of making things better and striving for technical excellence, delivering resilient systems, ideally behind consumer products
• You have experience working on Backend Systems, Event-driven, Data-intensive systems
• You are delivery-focused and pragmatic. Code has no value until it's in the hands of customers. Perfection blocks adding value.
• You're comfortable dealing with ambiguity and have experience helping your teams and peers resolve that ambiguity
• You have a continuous learner mindset and are looking to keep growing

Even if you don't meet 100% of what is listed above, it still sounds cool and you would like to apply, please do.

We are an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Discrimination of any kind based on race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status is strictly prohibited.