Automata was founded on the principle that humanity is at its best when thinking. That means freeing humanity from the tyranny of repetitive, mundane jobs.

Today Automata is building a world-class company to disrupt the life science industry with our new core product that automates life science workflows across diagnostic, drug discovery and synthetic biology labs.

Our mission is to empower scientists with accessible lab automation tools that are fast, flexible, and cost-efficient.

What you will be doing:

Develop and create a simple API for our IoT hub and its Python server

which receive/process cloud instructions and upload data through gRPC; providing a sandbox for our drivers and customer scripts (Python DSL).

At its heart, this role is about running protocols, orchestrating and reporting to the platform, as well as executing instructions that the platform sends.

Tech Stack:

• Python
• gRPC
• IoT devices
• Docker

Why work here?

You're curious and passionate about automation and robotics.

You’re tired of working for yet another fintech or building yet another e-commerce app selling stuff no one knew they needed (and probably don’t).

The code you write will perform physical output in the real world. You can see the effect of what you will do. The output isn’t a website. That’s pretty cool.

Specifically, your work will

1. Automate diagnostic testing (for cancers, genomic diseases)

2. Automate drug discovery (33% faster to market and to patients)

3. Automate synthetic biology labs (cell based meats, revolutionising meat production and land use)

The team:
We’re agile (with a small a). Not big on formality or frameworks and use the tools that suit us best. You’re comfortable with change and believe that moving fast and building well-tested software quickly and iteratively in a team that is constantly improving and learning helps us deliver the most value for our users.

Engineering 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.

More reasons to apply

• Learning & Development 🎓 £1,000 per year to spend as you wish

• Holiday 🏖️ 25 days per year (PLUS we close the office between Christmas and New Year)

• Private Healthcare ❤️ Vitality Health is available to all of our permanent employees

• Flexible working 🤹 Blended approach to office and WFH

• Employee referrals 💰 £1,000 per referral hired from your network

• Share Options Scheme 📈 Every team member gets a pot of stock option after probation

• Keeping you fed 🥙 Our kitchen is always stocked and we order lunch in on Fridays

• Dog-friendly offices 🐶 Lola, Evie and Alfie are the current resident pooches

What is the Process?

CV review

Phone interview - 30 mins with the hiring manager

Code test - HackerRank & 15 min Personality Strengths Assessment

Technical Interview - 1.5 hours with hiring team

Final Interview - 30 minutes with VP of Engineering