Group Lead - Scientific Computing Infrastructure

Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer. Ginkgo is constructing, editing, and redesigning the living world in order to answer the globe’s growing challenges in health, energy, food, materials, and more. Our bioengineers make use of an in-house automated foundry for designing and building new organisms. Today, our foundry is developing over 40 different organisms to make different products across multiple industries.

Specific Role Description

Ginkgo’s Design Team is a group of computational biologists tasked with making genetic design more predictable and robust. Design consists of three sub-teams that focus on distinct areas: enzymes, genes & pathways, and mammalian computational biology. This role establishes a fourth sub-team, Infrastructure & Modernization (I&M), with the mission of building Design scalably and sustainably via improvements to its technology foundation. Concretely, the I&M Group Lead will set vision and strategy for Design’s compute infrastructure and core software; establish best practices and create infrastructure for scientific computing, software development, data modeling, and data management; and assume technical leadership over Design’s core software stack. In this highly collaborative role, successful candidates would be able to serve as translation layers between computational biologists, software engineers, devdata scientists, and product managers.

Responsibilities

• In collaboration with broader Design team, set vision for Design’s strategic infrastructure roadmap, and priorities for core scientific infrastructure
• Set policies & educate team on best practices for scientific computing, software development, and data management, keeping these up to date with industry standards. Ensure compliance via training of team members and active monitoring of quality.
• Develop and maintain Design’s scientific infrastructure, including core stack, focusing as appropriate on robustness, usability, and accessibility of documentation
• Interface with Ginkgo’s Data and Digital Technology divisions to communicate requirements and priorities from Design, and manage migration of Design to latest and greatest Ginkgo infrastructure
• As the I&M group grows, manage direct reports and foster their career development

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional experience in bioinformatics software development, scientific computing, or data management. Subject matter expertise on biological sequence data (nucleic acids or proteins) is preferred
• A minimum of a Bachelors Degree in Biology, Computer Science or related field is required. Advanced Degrees in these fields are encouraged to apply
• Proficiency with Python and the Python community’s best practices
• Proficiency with practices for collaborative software development: version control systems (e.g. Git), containerization (Docker), test-driven development, and documentation systems
• Strong communication ability across technical disciplines and their jargons, specifically: synthetic biology, software engineering, and DevOps
• Experience with cloud computing platforms. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is preferred.
• Demonstrated ability to meet the demands of multiple concurrent projects, collaborate with multiple stakeholder groups, and work efficiently in a fast-paced, high-growth environment

Additional Preferred Competencies

• First-hand technical experience in one or more of the following disciplines:  genetics, microbiology, comparative genomics, genome assembly & annotation, statistics, probabilistic modeling, machine learning, or quantitative biology
• Project management experience
• People management experience

How to Apply - We look forward to hearing from you. Please send us the following:

• A cover letter describing a little about yourself, your prior work, your career goals, and what makes you interested in joining our team
• A résumé or curriculum vitae
• A sample of your code: a GitHub profile, if you have one, is preferred. Otherwise, attached files are ok.

To learn more about Ginkgo, check out some recent press:

What is it really like to take your company public via a SPAC? One Boston biotech shares its journey (Fortune)

Ginkgo Bioworks resizes the definition of going big in biotech, raising $2.5B in a record SPAC deal that weighs in with a whopping $15B-plus valuation (Endpoints News)

Ginkgo Bioworks CEO on scaling up Covid-19 testing: ‘If we try, we can win’ (CNBC)

Ginkgo raises $70 million to ramp up COVID-19 testing for employers, universities (Boston Globe)

Ginkgo Bioworks Redirects Its Biotech Platform to Coronavirus (Wall Street Journal)

Ginkgo Bioworks Provides Support on Process Optimization to Moderna for COVID-19 Response (PRNewswire)

The Life Factory: Synthetic Organisms From This $1.4 Billion Startup Will Revolutionize Manufacturing (Forbes)

Synthetic Bio Pioneer Ginkgo Raises $290 Million in New Funding (Bloomberg)

Ginkgo Bioworks raises $350 million fund for biotech spinouts (Reuters)

Can This Company Convince You to Love GMOs? (The Atlantic)

We also feel that it’s important to point out the obvious here – there’s a serious lack of diversity in our industry, and that needs to change. Our goal is to help drive that change. Ginkgo is deeply committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in all of its practices, especially when it comes to growing our team. Our culture promotes inclusion and embraces how rewarding it is to work with people from all walks of life.  

We’re developing a powerful biological engineering platform, so we must remain mindful of the many ways our technology can – and will – impact people around the world. We care about how our platform is used, and having a diverse team to build it gives us the best chance that it’s something we’ll be proud of as it continues to grow. Therefore, it’s critical that we incorporate the diverse voices and visions of all those who play a role in the future of biology.

It is the policy of Ginkgo Bioworks to provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and employment applicants.

Apply for this job