Member of Technical Staff, Software

Job summary

THE OPPORTUNITY Substrate is building a laboratory that runs itself. Something has to turn a scientist's intent into work the instruments actually execute, schedule it across the lab, and capture everything that happens as structured data. That software does not fully exist yet.

Qualifications

• WHO YOU ARE
• You are a generalist who has shipped production systems that other people depend on.
• You write good code at speed, you have opinions about architecture, and you have learned when to hold them and when to defer.
• You are happy owning a service end to end, including the parts that are not glamorous: reliability, observability, the on-call pager.
• You have worked across the stack and can pick up whatever the problem in front of you needs.
• MUST HAVE
• There is a voice in your head asking why you are building this, who it is for, and what would make it 100x better.
• You build with coding agents by default, and you have opinions and taste about what they produce rather than blind faith in the output.
• Experience at the software-to-physical-world boundary (lab automation, robotics, manufacturing, logistics, scientific instruments, or energy).
• Early-stage or founding-engineer experience at a venture-backed company.
• It is worth knowing in advance which one you are.

Responsibilities

• You will build the infrastructure software that runs the lab, working across the stack with the founding software engineer and the team.
• You do not need a biology background and we will not test for one; the science is something you will learn enough of by working next to it.
• You will also work at the same table as software, hardware and biology, and the three do not always agree.
• You will work in a hybrid pattern with regular time in the lab at 20 Triton Street, where the instruments and the people running the assays are, because the software is built close to the thing it runs.

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