Staff Software Engineer, Lab Software

About the role

Join us in shaping the future of science! We are seeking Staff Software Engineers with backend experience to join our Lab Software Team (LaS), where you'll collaborate with software engineers, lab scientists, and machine learning engineers to build cutting-edge tools for automated scientific analysis and more. If you thrive in a collaborative, fast-paced environment and bring best practices in git, development workflows, and user-centered design, we want to hear from you! You will own the design and delivery of high-impact features across the full lab stack, partnering closely with cross-functional teams to turn scientific requirements into reliable, production-grade software. You will drive technical decisions that balance scalability, performance, and maintainability while ensuring a seamless experience for both AI scientists and laboratory operators. You will act as a key technical leader in the LaS team, mentoring peers and elevating engineering standards across the organization. Your work will directly enable experiments to run autonomously on real instruments, accelerating scientific discovery through automation.

Key facts

What you'll do

Design and build high-performance, secure, and well-documented UI and APIs that integrate with AI-driven applications.

Develop schemas and manage diverse data systems (SQL, NoSQL, Vector DBs, and others) for optimal performance and scalability.

Drive the implementation of front-end and backend services, focusing on performance, maintainability, and reliability.

Diagnose and optimize system bottlenecks, ensuring high availability and low-latency performance across large-scale workloads.

Leverage AWS services, Kubernetes and modern DevOps practices to build and deploy production-grade systems at scale.

Work with ML researchers, engineers, and scientists to integrate data pipelines, APIs, and cloud infrastructure into scientific workflows.

Own complex backend challenges, balancing trade-offs between scalability, performance, and maintainability while delivering robust solutions.

Collaborate closely with product and design to translate user needs into intuitive interfaces and reliable API contracts.

Implement observability, monitoring, and alerting strategies to ensure reliable operation of lab-facing services around the clock.

Contribute to code reviews, architectural discussions, and long-term technical planning to continuously improve the lab software platform.

Partner with infrastructure teams to define deployment strategies, manage environments, and ensure security and compliance for lab workloads.

Support on-call responsibilities to respond to production incidents and ensure minimal disruption to ongoing scientific experiments.

Engage in knowledge-sharing activities such as tech talks, documentation, and mentoring to elevate the overall engineering culture.

Explore and prototype new technologies that could enhance the reliability and efficiency of automated scientific analysis pipelines.

Champion testing, automation, and quality practices to ensure releases are safe, predictable, and well understood.

Requirements

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.

8+ years of engineering experience building and deploying large-scale systems in production. You must be strong in backend.

Full Stack Development experience developing web apps across the full stack (React, TypeScript, TailWind, FastAPI, SQL/NoSQL, Python, Pydantic).

Hands on experience using AI coding assistants to drive productivity is required.

Acute listening skills, and a proven track record of working cross-functionally with scientists, data engineers, and product teams; able to explain complex ideas to diverse audiences.

Proven ability to take ownership of complex backend challenges, balancing trade-offs between scalability, performance, and maintainability.

Strong written and verbal communication skills for coordinating with distributed teams and documenting technical decisions.

Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment while maintaining attention to detail and high standards.

Comfortable working with cloud-native technologies, distributed systems, and data-intensive applications.

Willingness to collaborate closely with laboratory staff to understand requirements and validate software behavior in scientific contexts.

Commitment to writing clean, maintainable, and well-tested code that supports long-term system evolution.

Openness to contributing to both strategic technical planning and hands-on implementation across the stack.

Eagerness to learn domain-specific concepts in life sciences and work effectively with interdisciplinary teams.

Nice to have

Exposure to laboratory software for life sciences, material sciences, or related fields.

Experience with laboratory devices, robotics, or hardware drivers.

Experience with software orchestration platforms (Airflow, Prefect, Temporal, Dagster) and design patterns.

Hands-on experience with AWS; strong understanding of Kubernetes and containerization, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions).

Practical notes

This is a full-time position based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Travel is not required. Visa sponsorship is available for eligible candidates. Employment is at-will. Only candidates who match the requirements will be contacted for the next steps.