Analytical Chemist

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.

Core to our organism engineering pipeline is the testing and analysis of our engineered strains. We leverage diverse analytical tools to get a detailed picture of the performance of these strains. Our analytical approaches are designed to work across dozens of different cultured ingredients and scale 100-1000x via software and automation. We’re seeking highly skilled, aspiring analytical chemists to join our testing team, where you will help to operate, improve and scale our chromatography based strain analysis pipelines.

As the ideal candidate for the Analytical Chemist role, you will bring a foundation of knowledge in analytical chemistry and analytical chromatography. You will have a passion for learning about and evolving processes in response to changing technology and demands. You will have good attention to detail and be diligent in executing defined processes, while also providing insight where applicable for the improvement of those processes. In addition, any experience you have in process tech transfer, analytical methods validation, technical documentation, and general chemistry will set you up for success.

#LI-LS1

Responsibilities

Operate our in house Liquid/Gas chromatography methods for quantitative and qualitative analysis of target analytes
Engage in troubleshooting and maintenance of instrumentation when data is out of spec or instruments fail
Participate in the implementation of quality controls to our assays to ensure low CV and high reproducibility
Utilize in house LIMS and data capture pipelines to efficiently deliver high quality data within expected turnaround times and quality specs
Utilize our fleet of Hamilton liquid handling robotics to execute on high throughput analytical sample prep
Work with other members of the analytical chemistry team to drive standardization, quality processes and documentation towards improving our analytical infrastructure

Required Experience and Capabilities

BS in analytical chemistry, chemistry, chemical engineering, or equivalent degree
Minimum of 3 years of industry experience in analytical chemistry utilizing liquid or gas chromatography to deliver quantitative results
Prior knowledge of rudimentary analytical statistics (standard deviations, coefficients of variance, regression analysis, etc.)

Desired Experience and Capabilities

Prior experience working with automated and/or high throughput liquid handlers (Hamilton, LC autosamplers, automated workcells, etc.)
Demonstrated experience implementing quality controls in wet lab processes
Experience working within a cross functional environment
Knowledge of LEAN (or other organizational methodologies) to improve process efficiency and quality a plus

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.