Mechatronics Engineer 2

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. 

 

Ginkgo Introduction 

Ginkgo is a well-capitalized public biotech company headquartered in Boston that 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 mission to “make biology easier to engineer” is poised to disrupt multiple industries by leveraging our innovative data, automation, and scale in biological engineering.

Team Introduction 

We’re looking for talented engineers who are excited by the challenges of scaling and improving our Automation Technology. Ginkgo is hiring an Automation Engineer 2, specializing in Mechatronics, to join our in-house automation and integration team. This team is responsible for designing, developing, and deploying automation solutions to both internal labs and external automation customers. Ginkgo’s Automation team is building the technology for a scalable, reconfigurable, highly automated industrial factory. 

Job Description
This is a Hybrid role out of our Emeryville, CA location

You’ll be working hand in hand with biologists, software developers, and other engineers to co-develop the wetware, hardware, and software infrastructure that enables walkaway automation for various applications.

The Automation Mechatronics Team is responsible for designing and deploying the mechanical, electrical, and control systems that form the basis for our novel integrated robotic systems. As a member of the team, you may be responsible for identifying and sourcing off-the-shelf equipment, delivering quick turnaround custom hardware, programming robot trajectories, managing contract manufacturers, programming PLCs, and more. You will follow your designs through the complete product lifecycle from concept, to requirements gathering, to delivery, to second tier support. 

Like all Mechatronics engineers on the team, you will have tasks sourced from a number of different projects on your todo list. You should expect variety in your day-to-day work, along with an agile environment where priorities shift quickly in response to new projects and updated customer needs. The Mechatronics team has a broad set of responsibilities covering a range of technical fields. Depending on your background and your preferred career trajectory, you may contribute to sensor specification and data tracking, controls, manufacturing, mechanical design, and robotics. Who works on what is driven just as much by our current skills as by what we want to learn. We’re open to learning new tools or methodologies to get the job done more efficiently, and we hope that you will bring new ideas and perspectives to the team!

To learn more about automation engineering at Ginkgo, take a look at this blog post: Day in the Life: Kristen.

Responsibilities

• Design and build infrastructure for automating high-throughput lab processes
• Collaborate with biologists on automation equipment design and operation
• Work with vendors to build understanding of needs and capabilities

Minimum Requirements

• BS in Mechanical, Mechatronics, Systems, Robotics engineering or equivalent
• Relevant experience in 3 or more of the following areas
• Laboratory automation systems and experimental workflow development
• Project-based experience using an engineering 3D CAD software package. We use SolidWorks, but we would be open to considering engineers with experience using other 3D CAD programs such as Autodesk Inventor, etc.
• Experience with making both 2D and 3D parts. Familiarity with several metal and/or plastic fabrication and cutting techniques. This might include milling, turning, laser/waterjet/plasma/oxy-acetylene methods.
• Basic knowledge of wiring circuits, terminating cables with various connector types, power budgets, etc.  
• Familiarity with PLC’s, safety circuits and safety sensors, power electronics, etc. 
• Systems engineering training or mindset with attention to detail
• Ability to independently execute on tasks to complete project work, with strategic support from manager and other stakeholders

Preferred Capabilities and Experience

We do not expect that any one candidate will have all of the following experiences - each is independently a preferred or