Senior Service Engineer

Work Schedule

Standard (Mon-Fri)

Environmental Conditions

Office

Job Description

At Thermo Fisher Scientific, you'll discover meaningful work that makes a positive impact on a global scale. Join our mission to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer. We empower our teams with the tools, resources, and autonomy needed to drive innovation and solve some of the world's toughest challenges—from ensuring food safety to advancing life-saving therapies.

Location/Division-Specific Information:

Carlsbad, CA. Relocation assistance is NOT provided. 

*Must be legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship.

*Must be able to pass a comprehensive background check, which includes a drug screen.

Discover Impactful Work:

The Senior Service Engineer plays a critical role in supporting pre-sales instrument demonstration programs within the Life Sciences Group of Thermo Fisher Scientific by ensuring high-performance, fully functional instrumentation across a diverse portfolio. This position reports to the Sr Manager of ISC Customer Experience and operates within a small, highly collaborative team responsible for instrument quality control, repair, warehousing, and logistics.

In this hands-on, dynamic role, you will not only diagnose, repair, and maintain sophisticated life sciences instrumentation, but also lead technical onboarding and integration of new products into the demonstration program. Success requires strong ownership, organization, and the ability to independently drive projects from concept through execution.

This role is ideal for an engineer who thrives in a fast-paced, team-oriented environment, is eager to expand beyond the bench, and is willing to step in wherever needed to support team and business priorities.

A Day in the Life:

Instrument Maintenance & Quality

• Perform advanced troubleshooting, repair, and preventative maintenance on complex instrumentation (electronics, fluidics, and mechanical systems).
• Execute and refine quality control (QC) processes to ensure instruments meet demonstration readiness standards.
• Diagnose and repair instruments down to the component level.
• Ability to analyze and present QC/Repair data and identify trends to management and key stakeholders.

New Product Integration

• Lead technical onboarding of new instruments into the demonstration program.
• Develop QC protocols, service documentation, and spare parts strategies to support rapid deployment and repair.
• Partner within the demonstration support team and cross-functionally with R&D, Product Management, and Global Service teams to ensure readiness.
• Track project timelines, lead meetings, and communicate status updates to stakeholders.

Operational & Team Support

• Contribute across the full instrument lifecycle, including QC, repair, inventory management, shipping/receiving, and warehousing.
• Create and maintain Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to drive consistency and efficiency.
• Support demo software/platform integrity and usability.
• Identify and implement process improvements to increase efficiency and scalability.
• Assist in annual instrument replacement forecasting.

Collaboration & Communication

• Work cross-functionally with Product Management, R&D, Engineering, Global Service & Support, and commercial teams.
• Lead or participate in technical discussions, training sessions, and knowledge-sharing initiatives.
• Partner with global teams (including EMEA) to align on best practices.

Why This Role Stands Out

This is not a traditional service engineering role. You'll be part of a small, high-impact team where flexibility, ownership, and collaboration are essential. Beyond technical expertise, you'll have the opportunity to influence processes, lead new product integration, and directly support commercial success.

Keys to Success:

Education and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering or a related field and 5+ years of experience.
• Strong background in instrumentation repair, ideally within the life sciences industry.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot and repair complex systems at the component level.
• Experience with flow cytometry, imaging/detection, cell and gene therapy, or protein purification instrumentation preferred.

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

• Ability to thrive in a small, team-oriented environment with shared responsibilities.
• Self-starter with strong pro