Are you looking for a new challenge? We’re building a data platform to help our scientists use robots and machine learning to grow bacteria.

The MicroByre team brings new bacteria into the stable. The vast majority of microbes on the planet are not currently considered cultivable let alone genetically modifiable. MicroByre domesticates and then genetically engineers otherwise inaccessible and under-appreciated bacteria. Newly cooperative bacteria will help us replace ancient biomass (petrochemicals) with renewable biomass (lawn clippings) efficiently and economically.

We need your expert help. Your teammates are world class chemists, molecular biologists, synthetic biologists, and microbiologists using robots to grow bacteria. We need more than simple tabular data and parameterizations to bring underleveraged bacteria to industrial applications. You will show them a new way as part of a team developing a new data platform with interfaces for programming automations, data analysis, and visualizations while hiding the complexities of data collection, annotation, task orchestration, and robot control.

Prior experience with genomic data and sequencing technology is not required. If you are game to learn some basics of a squishy biological domain, we are looking forward to working with you. As we meet more and more bacteria and iterate through processes, the scientists will have more questions, need more tools and robots, and you will build up the infrastructure to incorporate new data sources and generate improved insights. No one appreciates a data engineer more than a scientist who doesn’t have to use Excel anymore!

Key Responsibilities:

• Collaborate with a cross-functional team of laboratory scientists, software engineers, and business development staff,
• Interact with our data model that integrates genomic, transcriptomic, metabolic, and analytical observations,
• Define and develop feature engineering for machine learning (ML) and data science processes,
• Collaborate on the development of data pipelines and workflow automation with our platform engineers,
• Contribute to an ML framework for data-guided development of genetically modified organisms.

Required qualifications:

• A master's degree or higher in computer science, applied mathematics, statistics, computational biology, or a related field,
• Postdoctoral or industrial experience in data science and its applications,
• Fluency in Python programming,
• Some experience in model curation from conception, feature development, training/fitting, to deployment,
• A solid understanding of statistical methods,
• A willingness to learn the basics of genetics, microbiology, and chemistry.

Bonus qualifications, skills, or experience:

• Experience processing scientific data,
• Domain expertise in genomics, metabolic engineering, synthetic biology, microbiology, or chemistry,
• Any experience with standard genomics software: BWA, GATK, SAMTools, etc.,
• An affection for tinkering and experimenting as we have specialized robots and devices all of which produce data,
• Experience adhering to best practices for software generation and maintenance,
• Jupyter notebooks and when not to use them,
• Data visualization,
• Git, Kubernetes, containers, DevOps, etc.,
• AWS, GCP, or various other cloud services,
• Graph and graph databases.

Flexible working hours

This position has the flexibility to work in the office and remote. There is an expectation that a few days a week will be in the office as we interact with scientists (our intelligent users) and robots (our other users). The schedule itself is flexible.

About us

MicroByre is a biotech startup located in the Berkeley/Oakland Bay Area. We recently closed a round of funding and are growing fast!

We offer a flexible working environment with a competitive salary and the opportunity to work remotely for a portion of the work week.

We offer competitive benefits:

• Three weeks paid vacation each year
• Every federal holiday is a paid holiday
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Life insurance and disability coverage
• 401(k) program with 3% employer match
• Equity

We offer a professional and intellectually stimulating work environment with plenty of opportunities to train up.
We take a lesson from the diversity evident from the study of ecology: it takes a lot of different kinds of skills working together with mutual respect to make a dent in the world. We are committed to a maintaining a work environment free of harassment and discrimination. All recruitment, salary, and promotion decisions are based on business need, qualification, and job requirements with no regard to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, family or parental status, veteran or disability status, religion or belief, or age. MicroByre is not sponsoring work visas or reimbursing relocation expenses for this position.