[jobs] Scheduler Software Engineer at Transcriptic's robotic cloud lab for biology
jsa...@transcriptic.com
Transcriptic is a 20-person biotech startup in Menlo Park, CA. We're building a robotic cloud laboratory for biology, making it so that biotech companies can be started by two grad students with a laptop just like web companies are today. We're currently 20 people and have raised $13M from investors including Google Ventures, IA Ventures, Data Collective, and Founders Fund.
We're looking for someone with a Master’s or PhD in computer science with a research background in planning and scheduling. Ideally, they'll have already worked at one or two places in industry and have previously written a planning system that was deployed to solve an actual business problem.
Briefly, we're receiving customer orders written at a high level of abstraction that we need to transform into low-level commands for the lab hardware. The complexity stems from the need to interleave multiple independent orders to be run concurrently on hardware (there is a strong analogy to process scheduling on a CPU) subject to various biological as well as physical constraints (for example, on the biology side plates can only remain unrefrigerated for so long, and on the hardware side, our plates must be transported in such a way that no one is ever directly above another to prevent bacterial contamination). We're currently using a constraint programming based approach with chronological backtracking for search, and are actively researching improvements. Efficiently scheduling our robotic operations is a large and exciting combinatorial optimization problem that we’re just starting to attack.
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To apply please visit:
https://jobs.lever.co/transcriptic