Research Software Engineer - iBioFoundry, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology
University of Illinois24 hours ago
Urbana, IL, USAStaff+
Responsibilities
- Implement, operate, and continuously improve a multi-agent AI system for planning biological research and executing experimental workflows.
- Integrate AI-generated workflows with robotic systems, laboratory instruments, and a central scheduler.
- Maintain critical software infrastructure for autonomous laboratory operations with emphasis on reliability, observability, fault tolerance, and safe operation.
- Develop and maintain an open-source scheduler for experiment planning, instrument coordination, and laboratory automation.
- Design scheduling infrastructure for concurrent workflows across heterogeneous laboratory equipment.
- Build data pipelines, services, and APIs connecting AI agents, instruments, experiment-management systems, and scientific databases.
- Ensure experimental data and system state are reliably captured, accessible, traceable, and usable by humans and AI systems.
- Establish engineering practices for testing, monitoring, deployment, documentation, version control, and incident response.
- Coordinate graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, assign and prioritize work, review code and architecture, and provide mentorship.
Requirements
- The posting emphasizes deep system-level expertise and ownership of the technical integrity of core infrastructure.
- Experience or demonstrated ability to build reliable, fault-tolerant, observable software for complex research or operational environments is relevant to the role.
- Ability to design scheduling infrastructure, data pipelines, services, and APIs integrating AI systems with laboratory equipment and scientific databases.
- Ability to establish software engineering best practices and diagnose failures in complex, safety-sensitive systems.
- Ability to coordinate technical work, review code and architectural decisions, and mentor graduate students and postdoctoral researchers.