Automation Engineer

The Botnar Institute of Immune Engineering (BIIE) is a nonprofit research institute focusing on developing translational solutions for treatment prevention and diagnostics of diseases relevant in global child & adolescent health. We are looking for an automation engineer to join our laboratory automation team to solve the technical challenges in scaling up the experiments designed to improve our understanding of the immune system and find solutions to the health challenges.

Tasks

The key responsibilities of the Automation Engineer:

• Design and integration of extensions to the laboratory automation platform.
• Assess feasibility and resource requirements of new automation projects for life science research.
• Troubleshoot technical issues and improving reliability of the automation systems.
• Benchmark and analyzing the performance of instruments and automation equipment.
• Design and building custom software and hardware solutions.
• Keep up to date with the latest developments in laboratory automation.
• Develop automated workflows.

Requirements

Core skills and experience expected from the Automation Engineer:

• At least a Masters degree in a relevant field (e.g. Biotechnology Software Engineering Robotics Mechanical Engineering)
• Experience in integrating programming and troubleshooting laboratory instruments robotic arms and liquid handling devices.
• Strong programming skills in Python or C# and experience with IoT applications and APIs.
• Good grasp of hardware development skills such as electronic circuit design microcontroller programming and additive manufacturing.
• Good data management skills and ability to automate the data flow between the instruments and our LIMS.
• Effective communication skills in English both written and verbal

In addition these skills make you even more successful in this role:

• Knowledge with scheduling software such as Cellario and Venus and experience with liquid handler method development.
• Previous experience interfacing with the Benchling API.
• Past experience developing drivers to automatically interface with laboratory instruments.
• Understanding of standards such as SiLA 2 OPCUA LADS AnIML and ADF.
• Wetlab experience and familiarity with molecular biology methods.
• Experience teaching and simplifying complex technical topics.

About the Botnar Institute of Immune Engineering
The Botnar Institute of Immune Engineering (BIIE) is a newly founded nonprofit research organization aiming to become a world leading research institute for the advanced study of immunological systems with a mission to develop translational solutions for the diagnosis treatment and prevention of disease.

The scientific foundation of the BIIE and the broader field of Immune Engineering is based on the intersection of three interdisciplinary subdomains: (i) systems immunology (ii) synthetic immunology and (iii) computational immunology. The BIIE will serve as a hub for multidisciplinary science by uniting people with diverse expertise in immunology biomedicine bioengineering systems and synthetic biology computational biology artificial intelligence and machine learning. As part of the mission of BIIE to make a lasting impact it will dedicate significant efforts in training earlystage researchers in this unique multidisciplinary environment thus enabling them to become future leaders in Immune Engineering.