Hey all! The company I work for, Ginkgo Bioworks (ginkgobioworks.com), is currently looking for software engineers, data engineers, automation engineers, and many other positions! I'm going to try my best not to sounds like a spammy recruiter here, but I've personally been a long term geek on the future of programming related things, and I can honestly say that this is one of the most exciting places I've ever worked! So why am I posting about a synthetic biology company in the Future of Coding slack? Because at Ginkgo, our mission is to "Make Biology Easier To Engineer", and for us that means developing new tools and techniques to allow people to someday program cells the same way computers are programmed today. But instead of programming a computer to process data, we are programming cells to produce physical goods. Everything from living medicines, to food, to fragrances, and a million other things as well. Obviously an ambitious goal, but there is plenty of exciting work to be done, and we are looking for good software, automation and UX folks to help, even if they don't necessarily have a biology background. For example, I came from a robotics background, and am learning a lot of the biology side myself! I'm currently working on a platform for large scale automation of lab experiments, including exploring new ways of "biological intent declaration, e.g. investigating DSL's for turning a biologists lab protocol into instructions that run in our robotics labs! We also have teams building graphical tools for designing genes, teams working on data pipelines and ML, teams building databases and tools to organize all of our knowledge of cell engineering, etc....plus all sorts of other interesting stuff! And for the super computer language nerds (like myself!), you'll also be working at a company co-founded by Tom Knight. As in famous MIT Professor / Lisp Hacker Tom Knight, now known as the "Godfather of Synthetic Biology" 😄 Please feel free to reach out to me if you are interested or want to ask any questions! I'll also try to post some interesting stuff in the 🧵shortly

That is pretty cool! Thanks for sharing Tony

This is pretty awesome!! I guess there are some interesting challenges here, including debugging which could go horribly wrong?

@Vijay Chakravarthy definitely some interesting challenges! On the robotics side testing anything that interacts with the physical world can be tricky. On the biology side things there is lots exciting happening. Imagine trying to program and debug a computer that you are still in the process of reverse engineering to figure out the instruction set and operating principles. Its a real fun mix of engineering combined with pure science, and it requires new tools to be invented to do the work :-)

Sounds very fun. I'm not looking for work, but we specialize in DSLs, so if there are any projects out in the open it looks like an interesting area to thinker in. I will try to watch the videos soon, thanks for sharing them.

Totally sounds very fun. Alas, I have very little overlap with the tech stack :(

Late reply @CocoaGeek but just wanted to add here for you (and others) that even if you don't know about biology or a particular language we use, don't let that stop you if you are interested! We have a lot of folks from different backgrounds, and on the software side we are doing everything from node to Django to ruby-on-rails backends, as well as a lot of "serverless" / AWS. Also have a lot React / Typescript stuff going on with front end, and tons more I haven't even mentioned. On top of that, we are also investing more into building out our general UX/UI expertise, which is less about stack and more about working to come up with best design for our users. All this to say: especially on software and automation side, we care less about if you are proficient in a particular stack or language. Those things come and go, and we are still exploring! If you have the general engineering skills to succeed in the position, and are passionate and willing to learn something new, then please feel free to reach out!