Product Designer

Ginkgo Bioworks, Boston, MA

THE ORGANISM COMPANY

Duration: Full-Time

About Ginkgo Bioworks

Ginkgo’s mission is to make biology easier to engineer. We program cells to make everything from food to materials to therapeutics. Ginkgo bioengineers use our foundry—a custom-built, centralized set of robotic lab equipment and software—to build new organisms for making natural products, pharmaceuticals, biofuels, and more. We're creating the code base, compiler and debugger for biology. Success in this evolving field is only possible with teams that represent diverse people, ideas, experiences, and ways of working. We’re an equal opportunity employer and encourage people of all backgrounds to apply.

About the Role

Contributing to Ginkgo’s mission to make biology easy to engineer, the User Experience (UX) team builds elegant, intuitive, and consistent interfaces that streamline the completion of scientific workflows. We’re growing our team to take the user experience of Ginkgo’s custom software to the next level as we work to build the synthetic biology platform of the future.

As a Product Designer, you’ll leverage your design skills to bring our product designs and design system to life. You’ll work with product managers, engineers, biologists, and a top notch UX team to expand the scale of our impact across the company.

To facilitate this collaboration, you’ll be working in a Hybrid environment (Hybrid In-Office model, with up to 2 days WFH per week) at our headquarters in the exciting Seaport District of Boston.

About You

You’ve spent years honing your design craft. Your colleagues look to you as a thought leader in the design space. You are curious. When you don’t know something, you ask. You love tackling complex problems. You have the ability to work independently, but you also know how to collaborate effectively. You have the flexibility to apply design standards (even from other domains) but you also know when to break the mold and develop entirely new interaction models. You are a creative problem solver who thinks about design as a way to improve people’s lives.

As our software is internal, this means that all of our users are right here on site. You’ll be working with them in workshops and user research sessions to uncover unmet needs, iterate your designs, and solve for pain-points. You’ll have the opportunity to apply your passion for design to both biology and scientific software. You will be making biology easier to engineer.

Please include a link to your portfolio in your application.

Responsibilities

Lead project design initiatives, both independently and collaboratively
Create and iterate on UX design concepts, interactive prototypes and hand-off specifications for our software and automation tools
Create prototypes, test with users, and collect feedback to identify usability improvements and design challenges
Maintain strong partnerships with stakeholders and developers throughout the entire design process
#LI-DW1

Minimum Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in UX Design, Interaction Design, Human Factors, or a related field
7+ years of design experience
Ability to work work independently as well as collaboratively
Advocate for and practitioner of Human Centered Design, Design Thinking methodologies and Universal Design principles
Advanced understanding of design research methodologies and service design methodologies
Enthusiasm for the role! You will be working with some of the best scientists and engineers to develop software tools that solve never-before-seen scientific challenges

Preferred Experience and Capabilities

Experience designing for scientific or data-intensive software, physical products, automation systems, or complex services
Enthusiasm for contributing to UX team processes and best practices, including design systems and pattern libraries
Prototyping skills for lo-fidelity, hi-fidelity and everything in between
Previous work with software development teams and Agile frameworks
Experience creating data visualizations for technical applications
Past experience with or a strong curiosity about biology and/or life sciences
Master’s degree or higher in UX design or a related field
Understanding of front end engineering concepts and fluency with basic coding

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

What is it really like to take your company public via a SPAC? One Boston biotech shares its journey (Fortune)

Ginkgo Bioworks resizes the definition of going big in biotech, raising $2.5B in a record SPAC deal that weighs in with a whopping $15B-plus valuation (Endpoints News)

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, equity, 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.