Staff Software Engineer –Lab Automation
Thermo Fisher Scientific25 days ago
Base Salary
$129k - $175k/yr
Responsibilities
- Provide technical leadership and architectural direction for instrument-control software, graphical user interfaces, laboratory automation, workflow orchestration, and connected instrumentation.
- Design, develop, integrate, and deploy automation frameworks coordinating instruments, robotics, devices, and software services into reliable laboratory workflows.
- Develop AI-enabled capabilities for troubleshooting, workflow and protocol assistance, knowledge retrieval, run-data interpretation, anomaly detection, and context-aware automation.
- Ensure AI-enabled solutions include evaluation, testing, monitoring, security, data protection, traceability, human oversight, and defined safety and control boundaries.
- Diagnose complex issues involving application software, instrument communication, hardware, firmware, scripts, operational data, and laboratory workflows.
- Translate scientific, customer, system, and business requirements into reliable, scalable, and maintainable technical solutions.
- Define reusable instrument and device abstractions, APIs, data models, and communication patterns for interoperability and orchestration.
- Help define and execute the technical roadmap for connected instruments, intelligent instrument-control software, and increasingly autonomous laboratory workflows.
- Collaborate with engineering, product, applications, service, and customer-facing teams, including geographically distributed teams.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree with at least 5 years, or master’s degree with at least 3 years, of professional software development experience in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Automation Engineering, or a related technical field.
- Advanced proficiency in Python and TypeScript with experience delivering production-quality software systems.
- Preferred experience with Java.
- Experience developing, integrating, and supporting software for scientific instruments, laboratory automation, robotics, medical devices, or other hardware-controlled systems.
- Experience integrating instruments, automation systems, embedded controllers, sensors, robotics, or firmware using vendor SDKs, APIs, messaging systems, serial communication, or comparable technologies.
- Strong understanding of software architecture, object-oriented or modular design, design patterns, data structures, APIs, data models, and hardware abstraction.
- Experience with asynchronous programming, multithreading, event-driven design, instrument-state management, synchronization, exception handling, and fault recovery.
- Experience applying AI technologies or AI-assisted development tools to scientific instrumentation, laboratory automation, or engineering use cases, including local, edge, offline, or resource-constrained deployments.
- Experience with Agile or Scrum development methodologies and regulated product development practices, including documentation, requirements traceability, cybersecurity, risk management, verification, validation, and design controls.
- Ability to pass a comprehensive background check, including a drug screen.
Benefits
- Fully onsite Monday through Friday in Pleasanton, California; relocation assistance is not provided and priority is given to local Bay Area candidates.
- National medical and dental plans, national vision coverage, and health incentive programs.
- Employee assistance and family support programs, commuter benefits, and tuition reimbursement.
- At least 120 hours of paid time off, 10 paid holidays annually, paid parental leave, accident and life insurance, and short- and long-term disability.
- 401(k) retirement savings plan and employee stock purchase plan.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Thermo Fisher Scientific
Thermo Fisher Scientific builds analytical instruments, lab equipment and consumables, specialty diagnostics, and provides pharma services (CDMO and clinical research) for biotech, pharma, academic, and healthcare customers. It earns revenue through product sales, e-commerce distribution (Fisher Scientific), and contract services under brands such as Thermo Scientific, Applied Biosystems, Invitrogen, Patheon, and PPD. Headquartered in Waltham, MA, it is publicly traded on the NYSE (TMO) and was created by the 2006 merger of Thermo Electron and Fisher Scientific.