Staff Lab Automation Engineer

Company Description

Guardant Health is a leading precision oncology company focused on helping conquer cancer globally through use of its proprietary tests, vast data sets and advanced analytics. The Guardant Health oncology platform leverages capabilities to drive commercial adoption, improve patient clinical outcomes and lower healthcare costs across all stages of the cancer care continuum. Guardant Health has commercially launched Guardant360®, Guardant360 CDx, Guardant360 TissueNext™, Guardant360 Response™, and GuardantOMNI® tests for advanced stage cancer patients, and Guardant Reveal™ for early-stage cancer patients. The Guardant Health screening portfolio, including the Shield™ test, aims to address the needs of individuals eligible for cancer screening.

Job Description

About the Role:

As a Staff Lab Automation Engineer you will join an innovative group of engineers. You’ll help lead projects in all aspects of reagent and assay automation development, collaborate on obtaining requirements, optimizing automated workflows, troubleshooting, and validating a final workflow. You’ll be able to use and grow your molecular biology and biochemistry knowledge with an eye towards increasing the reliability, throughput, sustainability, and performance of NGS sample processing using advanced liquid handling platforms. You will be working both independently and collaborating with other Automation Engineers and Scientists on a Technology Development team to increase the future capabilities of multiple products.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Lead or contribute to development of reagent manufacturing and assay processes, technologies and innovate on current workflows. Focus on integrating automated liquid handling processes, robotic work cells, sample tracking and data management software, and tools.
• Take ownership for designing and outlining milestones needed to enable a product or product feature to follow a timeline. Collaborate closely with other development, operation, and quality teams.
• Analyze workflows, identify bottlenecks, and develop solutions to improve efficiency, throughput, cost, and quality to support released products.
• Program robotic liquid handling workstations and integrated robotic systems.
• Lead meetings, deliver presentations, and create reports for communicating new product development efforts.
• Prepare documentation for equipment validation and operating procedures and ensure successful lab implementation within a regulated environment.
• Mentor and guide automation and process engineers on technical efforts.

Qualifications

• BS degree in engineering or science with 10-15 years of related experience, MS with 5-8 years of related work experience, or PhD with 3-5 years of industry experience. 
• Hands-on experience with operating and programming liquid handling robotics platforms (Hamilton and Bravo liquid handlers preferred)
• Hands-on experience programming robots and robotic systems (Biosero GBG preferred.)
• Experience streamlining workflows, developing automated laboratory processes, and instrumentation systems from designing concepts to process validation and implementation. 
• Experience with next-generation sequencing (NGS) assays preferred. 
• Experience working within regulated environments (IVD, LDT, etc.)
• Strong communication and collaborative skills
• Ability to work, internal & external with diverse scientific, engineering, operational, and regulatory disciplines.
• Experience with statistical data analysis, monitoring data quality, and troubleshooting technical problems.

Additional Information

Hybrid Work Model: At Guardant Health, we have defined days for in-person/onsite collaboration and work-from-home days for individual-focused time. All U.S. employees who live within 50 miles of a Guardant facility will be required to be onsite on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. We have found aligning our scheduled in-office days allows our teams to do the best work and creates the focused thinking time our innovative work requires. At Guardant, our work model has created flexibility for better work-life balance while keeping teams connected to advance our science for our patients.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $94,720.00 to $127,870.00. The range does not include benefits, and if applicable, bonus, commission, or equity. The range displayed reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries across all US locations for the posted role with the exception of any locations specifically referenced below (if any).

For positions based in Palo Alto, CA or Redwood City, CA, the base salary range for this full-time position is $118,400.00 to $159,840.00. The range does not