Job Description:
We’re working on the next automation revolution of life-sciences laboratories to free our users from the tyranny of manual, repetitive tasks. Enabling them to focus on the more creative aspects of their roles. To achieve it we are designing and building a bunch of new hardware and software products.
We work with labs across the world to understand their specific workflows needs, and develop personalised solutions that range from diagnostic, drug discovery to synthetic biology. This allows us to simplify common automation tasks, while also supporting more advanced paths for specialised workflows, in a fast, flexible, and cost-efficient way.
To help us on our mission, we’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our growing teams which will be working on the acceleration of lab automation integrating our software systems in the engineering team.
Duties & Responsibilities
As an automation company, we rely on a highly skilled engineering team to provide the best software experience for labs, and our backend developers play a key part of that. From designing experiments to monitoring lab equipment in real-time, software engineering is a big part of what we do.
As a senior backend engineer at Automata, you will be working on our software platform, a central place for scientists in the life sciences space to design, monitor and automate their experiments. This is an opportunity to grow your knowledge, try out new ideas and make an impact.
Technology-wise we are using an event driven architecture, we are building microservices where it makes sense; backend-wise we mainly use Go-lang on the cloud and Python as we get closer to robots and IoT. We are hosted on AWS and make use of Kafka, DataDog. We use both SQL and NoSQL databases. We’ve recently shifted towards becoming a product driven engineering company and we make use of agile techniques to clarify and plan the work.
We’re a bunch of nice people, we aim very high, we’re highly collaborative, we innovate a lot and we are changing our ways whenever it makes sense. Even if we are a highly technical company we put people on top so if you join us your voice will be heard.
What it takes
-
Must have:
- Appreciation of the company values and software principles (as described below), and willingness to work within, and contribute to these frameworks
- Significant experience with any of the following languages: Go, Python, Java or C/C++
- Openness and willingness to learn Go (if you do not already have it under your toolbelt)
- Strong ability to plan solutions before implementation, and get feedback from the rest of the team
- Solid understanding of API design and documentation
-
Nice to have:
- Understanding of database internals
- Familiarity with gRPC
- Familiarity with AWS services (ECS, RDS)
What gets us excited?
- We’re passionate about the future of Technology and Automation and our growing success is built upon like minded individuals who share our passion.
- If this sounds like a good fit and you have experience with backend engineering you will love having the opportunity to build something that immediately adds value.
Software principles:
- Automate, automate, automate - we’re an automation company and hate doing things manually. - We automate anything that can be automated, increasing process reliability, deployment velocity, development velocity and quality.
- We help each other - We all own the product and better work happens when we work together. - We share risks and improve the product to deliver value to our customers.
- Keep it Simple - We avoid unnecessarily complicated code. We use off-the-shelf tools, technologies and libraries instead of writing it all ourselves. We prefer frequent, smaller releases over fewer, larger ones.
- Just decide already - Done is better than perfect. We make decisions based on imperfect information and believe that making the wrong decision is better than making no decision at all.
- Measure what you make - We live and breathe data. We instrument our code to track how it performs. We automate our testing so we know it works. We measure how our product behaves in the hands of our customers and use that data to inform what we do next.
- Nothing Is Sacred - We regularly reflect on our product and our ways of working. Using our learnings we change our approach to delivery and our product.
Company Benefits
-Learning & Development - £1000 per year
- Holiday - 30 days + 8 bank holidays
- Additional leave days - 4 volunteer days per year, 1 mental health day per quarter and your birthday off!
- Private Healthcare - We have Vitality Health, which includes eye and dental care
- Spill - mental health support - All-in-one mental health tool with access to CBT and sessions with therapists at no cost to the employee
- Enhanced parental leave + pay - A generous and supportive approach to mat and pat leave
- Leadership Coaching - Access to our Leadership coach for all of our managers
- Flexible working - Blended approach to office and WFH
- Keeping you fed - Team lunch once a week plus a well-stocked pantry
- Dog friendly offices - Lola, Kevin and Sally are the current resident pooches
Interview Process
- 1st Stage - 30 minute Talent Call - Google Hangout
- 2nd Stage - Hackerank Tech Test
- 3rd Stage - 1.5 Onsite Interview at HQ with Software Team
- 4th Stage - 30 minute call with Director of Software - Google Hangouts
