Staff Automation Engineer

What if the work you did every day could impact the lives of people you know? Or all of humanity?

At Illumina, we are expanding access to genomic technology to realize health equity for billions of people around the world. Our efforts enable life-changing discoveries that are transforming human health through the early detection and diagnosis of diseases and new treatment options for patients.

Working at Illumina means being part of something bigger than yourself. Every person, in every role, has the opportunity to make a difference. Surrounded by extraordinary people, inspiring leaders, and world changing projects, you will do more and become more than you ever thought possible.

Why Us

Illumina Laboratory Services (ILS) is an exciting and rewarding organization that applies Illumina’s core sequencing technology to the early clinical application of Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT) and TruSight Oncology (TSO) to demonstrate the real-world impact of using genomics to improve human health. The team focuses on expanding the utility of NIPT screening to test for genetic abnormalities across the genome. In addition, our goal for TSO is to provide each customer, ranging from research to translational to clinical, with targeted solutions that move NGS into the standard of care. The Foster City Process Engineering and Support Team’s (PEST’s) Lab Automation Engineers are responsible for bringing practical automation solutions to the lab and sustaining our deployed clinical workflows.

Why You

You are a seasoned expert in lab automation (liquid handlers) with demonstrated experience in independently developing new methods and complex troubleshooting. You have experience and an interest in integration of automation pieces with software such as LIMS. You see yourself as someone who is positive, innovative, proactive, able to be a technical expert and drive projects forward to success. You like to solve problems and propose solutions and have demonstrated that in the automation space. You thrive within a fast-paced environment. You are passionate about improving human health by making a direct impact with your work on products that are being used in clinical services.

The role

As part of the ILS PEST Lab Automation Team, you will use your extensive understanding of laboratory automation to drive the development and validation of our automated and high-throughput clinical laboratory services. You will understand what is available on the market, leading the evaluation of new automation solutions and driving strategic automation decisions. You will lead the development of new automated workflows and/or optimization of existing ones, from requirement gathering, to script programing, risk assessment, troubleshooting and validation. You will be a technical expert within a multi-disciplinary team working to ensure ILS products meet their stated claims, global regulatory requirements, and customer expectations.

Responsibilities:

• As part of the ILS PEST Lab Automation team, the Staff Automation Engineer will lead planning and executing technical and cross-functional activities for new product introductions, drive design changes and evaluate performance of specific clinical workflows with a key focus on automation.
• Lead transition of manual workflows onto automated liquid handling equipment or further development of existing automated workflows.
• Lead troubleshooting, root cause analysis and resolution of complex automation problems and work efficiently to reduce equipment downtime in the lab.
• Develop new automation methods and scripts in collaboration with clinical scientists, process engineers, and other cross-functional team members.
• Guide cross functional team to execute verification/validation activities against predefined automation design requirements and specifications.
• Implement proactive risk mitigation within automation discipline and at critical interfaces to other teams. Lead the risk assessment activities for automation.
• Write new scripts or modify existing scripts to run on automation platforms.
• Evaluate new pieces of automation to implement in a clinical lab, develop business cases to justify their use, and drive their implementation strategy.
• Integrate automation components with other sub-systems such as LIMS.
• Own the technical files related to the automation sub-processes of ILS’ pipelines.
• Improve standardization and business processes automation technical documentation.
• Innovate and optimize existing automation processes and equipment
• Lead core teams on medium to large sized, multi-disciplinary projects.
• Collaborate effectively with Operations, Bioinformatics, Software, Quality and other teams as needed to support ILS product development, continuous improvement, and sustaining activities.<