Staff Software Engineer

Level: 5

Salary band: £95,000 - £105,000

Bonus: 10% performance-based, discretionary

Location: Hybrid - work in our London office 2x/week

At Automata, we're on a mission to transform how scientists work by making automation accessible to every lab in the world. We believe that by giving labs the power to automate, we can unlock discoveries that will shape the future of life sciences—from diagnostics and drug discovery to synthetic biology.

But we’re more than just a company disrupting the industry—we're a team of innovators, problem-solvers, and creators passionate about empowering scientists. Our LINQ platform combines hardware and software to streamline workflows, making lab automation fast, flexible, and affordable. This means our customers can focus on groundbreaking research, while we take care of the rest.

Why Work at Automata?

• Impact: Your work will directly contribute to advancements in science and medicine, supporting labs around the globe as they push boundaries in research and innovation.
• Innovation: You’ll be part of a team solving complex problems (seriously, no one else has figured out how to do this yet), using cutting-edge technology (we have robots).
• Growth: We invest in our people. Whether through hands-on experience, professional development, or collaborative projects, you’ll grow both professionally and personally.
• Community: Join a diverse, passionate team that values collaboration (golf on a Thursday, Soccer once a month, movie nights whenever we fancy it).

At Automata, we're on a mission to transform how scientists work by making automation accessible to every lab in the world. We believe that by giving labs the power to automate, we can unlock discoveries that will shape the future of life sciences, from diagnostics and drug discovery to synthetic biology.

But we're more than just a company disrupting the industry, we're a team of innovators, problem solvers, and creators passionate about empowering scientists. Our LINQ platform combines hardware and software to streamline workflows, making lab automation fast, flexible, and affordable.

The Role:

The Staff Software Engineer will architect and build robust Windows-based integration solutions that bridge our modern automation platform with laboratory instruments requiring proprietary Windows drivers and legacy enterprise systems. You'll design self-healing, backwards-compatible applications that operate across diverse Windows environments while managing complex hardware driver integrations, instrument protocols, and legacy .NET framework dependencies.

This role requires deep expertise in Windows platform development, legacy .NET framework compatibility, and enterprise integration patterns. You'll work with technologies spanning various versions of .NET, Windows services, and complex hardware communication protocols to ensure seamless operation with our Platform and 3rd party Hardware.

This role combines extensive experience in Windows platform engineering with scalable software architecture, enabling the development of creative solutions to novel integration challenges and the ability to think outside the box when traditional approaches don't work, ensuring highly resilient and robust systems across our LINQ platform.

About the team

Our engineers are more than just technically skilled; they're driven by curiosity and a growth mindset. They find immense joy in seeing the software power the robots and the hardware bench, transporting plates from instrument to instrument. They understand the profound impact of their work on the life sciences industry, and this fuels their passion.

Core Skills Required:

• Deep expertise in C# and .NET ecosystem across multiple framework versions
• Windows platform mastery
• Legacy system integration with experience migrating and maintaining applications across .NET Framework versions
• Enterprise integration patterns with emphasis on APIs, message queues, and event-driven architectures
• Experience leading projects as a technical leader
• Experience with mentoring and growing members of their team
• Experience with owning technical standards and best practices

We are flexible, but what matters most for us is your ability to be a problem solver. We are operating at the edge of robotics and science, so we need teammates who are comfortable with ambiguity and rapid innovation.

You are not expected to know everything, but here are some other of our core technologies and what our environment looks like:

• Python for our application code, APIs and SDK
• Proficiency in front-end frameworks (React)
• SQL and NoSQL databases: PostgreSQL, Couchbase, DynamoDB
• Knowledge of cloud services and deployment, preferably AWS (IoT Greengrass, ECS, Lambda and EKS)
• Infrastructure managed via Terraform and pipelines via CircleCI
• Kubernetes and Docker for running our applications
• Observability platform via Datadog
• Event-driven architecture, employing technologies such as Kafka, gRPC and Protobuf for event definitions
• Solver technology and algorithms to drive our workflow scheduling solver engine

In this role, you will be responsible for:

• Be a force multiplier and provide technical leadership to the team, elevating the team’s capabilities through mentorship, high-impact knowledge sharing, and stewardship, ensuring effectiveness and alignment towards contributing to the overall delivery.
• Shipping and building a resilient product with scale and reliability in mind so that we can entrust our product into the hands of our customers with pride, accounting for quality and security.
• Taking pragmatic approaches and keeping it simple by solving for problems that we have and not for problems we might encounter. Rapid innovation is always favored here.
• Collaborating and supporting your team because code is just one part of the job, but being a team player is a massive part. We prioritise working together with product partners, design and engineering to ensure transparency and alignment in our direction.
• Putting customers at the heart of what you do by understanding what makes sense for our users and engaging with them with integrity.

What it takes:

• Technical leadership and code excellence with the ability in developing high-quality code, conduct code reviews and lead technical initiatives through strong architectural understanding, mentorship, and the capacity to align team objectives with strategic technical vision.
• Team multiplier and collaborative problem solver who contributes to up-skilling the team, helping to resolve issues, sharing knowledge, and elevating others around you.
• Production experience across the core technology stack of Python and React, ideally working on data-intensive applications, microservices, event-driven architecture, SaaS or edge services. We also welcome diverse experiences in other languages, such as Golang and Rust.
• Automation-focused in setting up pipelines for managing our deployments and quality gates.
• Delivery-focused and pragmatic in ensuring customer value is delivered efficiently, with necessary trade-offs considered, balancing strategic direction, quality and resiliency.
• Collaborative problem solver in assisting engineering teams in improving developer productivity, solving complex challenges and enabling value delivery to customers.
• Have a product mindset, always keen to understand customer needs. Participate in product and design discussions, contributing ideas to ensure we do the most impactful work that will improve the product and user experience.
• Comfortable dealing with ambiguity, thinking through the problem space, shaping the product, seeking feedback, and adjusting the product through iterations.
• Effective stakeholder management in supporting customer engagement and navigating teams through incidents and customer support cases.

UK Team Benefits:

🍎 Vitality Health Insurance

Private healthcare that incentives a healthy lifestyle

👀 Eye Care

Get your eyes tested once a year on us!

🚗 Salary Sacrifice - EV

Sacrifice some of your monthly salary in exchange for a company car, provided by your Employer

🚲 Salary Sacrifice - Bike & Tech

Sacrifice some of your monthly salary in exchange for bike and tech products, provided by your Employer

🧘🏼 ♀️ Wellbeing & Support

Support for both your physical and mental health

☀️ Wellbeing & Development Allowance

Invest in your own well-being, personal growth, and hobbies

💙 Spill & Employee Assistance Programme

Access the therapy for you and your family through Spill

😊 Additional Leave

Time off for dependents, 'Me days', and volunteering days off

👵🏼 Pension Scheme

Plan for retirement with NEST

🫂 Group Life & Critical Illness cover

Life insurance - for a piece of mind

🎂 Birthday

Time off for your Birthday

We are an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Discrimination of any kind based on race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status is strictly prohibited.