Head of Process Development & Engineering

Ginkgo Bioworks, Boston, MA

THE ORGANISM COMPANY

Duration: Full-Time

Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer. Ginkgo is constructing, editing, and redesigning the living world in order to answer the globe’s growing challenges in health, energy, food, materials, and more. Our bioengineers make use of an in-house automated foundry for designing and building new organisms. Today, our foundry is developing over 40 different organisms to make different products across multiple industries.

To realize our dream of building a next-generation organism company, each of our organisms needs to be successfully deployed. Ensuring that the deployed product reproducibly meets customer and market specification in an economically viable process is critical to Ginkgo’s success. We are seeking a Head of Process Development & Engineering to lead a team of engineers in designing, developing and deploying fermentation, separation, and purification processes for a variety of products. The successful candidate will also be expected to proactively interact with Ginkgo’s program teams to efficiently solve problems through the powerful combination of biology and engineering.

The ideal candidate is passionate about process development, has demonstrated success in leading and managing upstream & downstream process development from R&D through to commercialization, and is able to interface with and incorporate information from multiple disciplines, both within Ginkgo and externally. The Head of Process Development & Engineering will be expected to lead the team both technically and strategically, and foster an environment in which team members are able to grow and develop into future technical and strategic leaders.

Responsibilities

Manage a team of Process Development Engineers in development of economically viable production and purification processes across a variety of industries, including industrial biotech, food & feed ingredients, and pharmaceuticals
Provide strategic leadership for Process Development & Engineering within the organization, driving expansion of internal and external capabilities as needed
Ensure the team develops scalable, robust, and cost-effective processes across a variety of products, on the specified timelines
Collaborate across Ginkgo’s technical, project management, and commercial teams to accelerate process development timelines, ensuring the team has the necessary resources to complete projects
Contribute to identifying new manufacturing sites, and addressing capital project needs at external manufacturing facilities, as needed
Interface with customer and contract manufacturing sites, which may include some travel

Desired Experience and Capabilities

BS in chemistry, chemical engineering, or similar field with 10 years of process development experience in industrial biotech or biopharmaceuticals
Prior experience and demonstrated success in managing a team of engineers toward successful development, scale-up and deployment of production and purification processes
Expertise in a variety of downstream unit operations
Ability to identify technical problems and propose path(s) to resolution
Team player with the ability to work with and incorporate input from people across a range of disciplines and levels

To learn more about Ginkgo, check out some recent press:

Ginkgo Bioworks CEO on scaling up Covid-19 testing: ‘If we try, we can win’ (CNBC)

Ginkgo raises $70 million to ramp up COVID-19 testing for employers, universities (Boston Globe)

Ginkgo Bioworks Redirects Its Biotech Platform to Coronavirus (Wall Street Journal)

Ginkgo Bioworks Provides Support on Process Optimization to Moderna for COVID-19 Response (PRNewswire)

The Life Factory: Synthetic Organisms From This $1.4 Billion Startup Will Revolutionize Manufacturing (Forbes)

Synthetic Bio Pioneer Ginkgo Raises $290 Million in New Funding (Bloomberg)

Ginkgo Bioworks raises $350 million fund for biotech spinouts (Reuters)

Can This Company Convince You to Love GMOs? (The Atlantic)

We also feel that it’s important to point out the obvious here – there’s a serious lack of diversity in our industry, and that needs to change. Our goal is to help drive that change. Ginkgo is deeply committed to diversity, equality, and inclusion in all of its practices, especially when it comes to growing our team. Our culture promotes inclusion and embraces how rewarding it is to work with people from all walks of life.

We’re developing a powerful biological engineering platform, so we must remain mindful of the many ways our technology can – and will – impact people around the world. We care about how our platform is used, and having a diverse team to build it gives us the best chance that it’s something we’ll be proud of as it continues to grow. Therefore, it’s critical that we incorporate the diverse voices and visions of all those who play a role in the future of biology.

It is the policy of Ginkgo Bioworks to provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and employment applicants.

About Ginkgo Bioworks

Ginkgo Bioworks is the organism company. We design custom microbes for customers across multiple markets. We build our foundries to scale the process of organism engineering using software and hardware automation. Organism engineers at Ginkgo learn from nature to develop new organisms that replace technology with biology.