Founding Robotics & Automation Engineer

Department: Wetlab

Location: South San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

Description:

Build the software and robotics that power the world's most advanced automated biology lab, generating massive amounts of high-quality experimental data to predict human outcomes with insane accuracy.

About Axiom:

Axiom’s mission is to end unexpected toxicity and make it possible to test drugs in humans rapidly, at massive scale, and without exposing patients to unforeseen risks. We are starting with liver toxicity, one of the leading causes of drug failure. We’ve built an extraordinarily accurate, high-throughput human liver safety platform that combines advanced human cell systems, imaging, transcriptomics, mass spectrometry, and drug metabolism measurements. Our AI agents integrate this experimental data with chemical structure, human exposure, and thousands of clinical reference compounds to predict whether a drug will be toxic in humans, why, and how to redesign it to be safer.

We work with seven of the world’s top twenty pharmaceutical companies to bring these capabilities directly into drug discovery, enabling scientists to design safety into molecules rather than discover toxicities years later. We also partner with leading frontier AI labs to turn our drug discovery expertise and experimental systems into training environments that teach AI models to become superhuman drug hunters. We then deploy these frontier models into applications that extend across all of drug development: making cancer therapies dramatically safer, enabling treatments for chronic diseases that demand exceptional safety, and rescuing promising drugs previously abandoned because of toxicity. Our ultimate ambition is to build a superhuman AI agent that can predict what will happen to a drug in humans before it ever enters a patient.

What you will do:

• Build an extraordinarily automated, high-throughput biology lab from the ground up

• Develop software to control, orchestrate, and monitor laboratory instruments, robotics, and experimental workflows

• Integrate liquid handlers, robotic arms, incubators, imaging systems, sequencers, mass spectrometers, and other scientific instruments into end-to-end automated workflows

• Work closely with scientists to translate complex biological assays into reliable, scalable automated protocols

• Develop systems for experiment scheduling, execution, monitoring, error recovery, and quality control

• Build infrastructure to capture complete experimental records, including instrument commands, metadata, logs, timestamps, and raw data

• Optimize laboratory workflows for extreme throughput, reproducibility, data quality, and minimal human intervention

• Transfer and automate advanced biological assays across Axiom's global network of partner laboratories

We’re especially interested in:

• Python, software engineering, APIs, asynchronous programming, and distributed systems

• PyLabRobot, Hamilton VENUS, Tecan EVOware, Opentrons, SiLA 2, and laboratory instrument APIs

• Laboratory automation, robotics, motion control, industrial automation, and hardware integration

• Liquid handling, automated plate movement, incubators, robotic arms, and integrated workcells

• High-throughput screening, high-content imaging, cell culture, sequencing, and mass spectrometry workflows

• Experiment orchestration, scheduling, instrument communication, data capture, and observability

• Mechanical, electrical, and systems engineering for troubleshooting and integrating laboratory equipment

• Laboratory information management systems (LIMS), laboratory execution systems, and experimental data infrastructure

What we look for:

• Exceptional coding ability and a strong foundation in software engineering

• Ability to bridge software, robotics, hardware, and biology to build complete automated experimental systems

• Obsession with reliability, reproducibility, data quality, and a hyper attention to detail

• A drive to push beyond conventional laboratory automation to develop radically better approaches to experimental science

• Strong systems thinking and the ability to understand and optimize complex end-to-end laboratory workflows

• Comfort working hands-on with unfamiliar instruments, debugging hardware, and solving difficult integration problems

• Ability to take ambitious projects from concept to fully operational systems with minimal oversight

• Obsessive technical curiosity for all things in robotics, software, biology, and drug discovery

• Strong ability to communicate and collaborate with scientists, engineers, and laboratory operators