Jobs / United States / Ginkgo Bioworks INC
Senior Software Engineer, Autonomous Lab (Scheduling & Optimization)
Ginkgo Bioworks INC · 🇺🇸 Boston, Massachusetts
Sponsorship verdict
Posting rules out sponsorship
The posting rules out sponsorship or requires citizenship/clearance.
- Employer is on a government sponsor recordThe US Department of Labor certified 6 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 5 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
- The posting says it won’t sponsorIts own wording says sponsorship is unavailable.
- No salary bar for this routeH-1B has no fixed salary bar: the employer must pay at least the prevailing wage for the role and area. Cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level. Source: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/29/2025-23853/weighted-selection-process-for-registrants-and-petitioners-seeking-to-file-cap-subject-h-1b, rules effective 2026-02-27.
- What Ginkgo Bioworks INC paid sponsored hires in similar roles1 certified filing for “Senior Engineer 1, Automation” (Molecular and Cellular Biologists) in MA: $124k–$124k, median $124k. Most were filed at wage level III (100%) — 3 lottery entries, ≈46% projected selection odds for cap-subject employers. Source: US Department of Labor LCA disclosure data (Oct 2025 – Jun 2026).
- Confirmed live todayWhen a source last listed this job as open.
US H-1B: cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level — Level I gets 1 entry, Level IV gets 4 (DHS projected selection odds ≈15% at Level I to ≈61% at Level IV). Universities and non-profit research employers are cap-exempt. The $100,000 fee for new petitions from abroad is currently blocked by a court order (appeal pending).
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Why not apply?
The posting states sponsorship is unavailable. Applying is unlikely to lead anywhere if you need sponsorship.
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Sponsor Radar — Ginkgo Bioworks INC
The US Department of Labor certified 6 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 5 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
Past sponsorship or register membership never guarantees sponsorship for this vacancy or for you. Full Sponsor Radar for Ginkgo Bioworks INC →
About the role
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. Senior Software Engineer, Autonomous Lab (Scheduling & Optimization) About the Role We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer with deep expertise in scheduling and operations research to join the Autonomous Lab software organization at Ginkgo Bioworks. This position is specific to the Orchestrator team. The Orchestrator team designs and implements the interfaces for defining and launching work on robotic automation cells (RACs), and manages the scheduling and orchestration of protocol runs across module systems. The ideal candidate is an experienced software engineer who has built and shipped production scheduling systems, with a working command of operations research, optimization, and constraint programming. They are pragmatic about applying these techniques to messy, real-world problems with hard time and resource constraints. To learn more about automation engineering at Ginkgo, take a look at our website . All positions require the candidate to work on-site Monday - Friday in our Boston office. Ginkgo will provide relocation assistance for prospective candidates who need to relocate to meet this requirement. Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of H-1B visas at this time. Responsibilities Scheduler & Optimization Development • Design, implement, and evolve the scheduling algorithms that orchestrate work across robotic lab automation cells. • Model real-world scheduling problems (resources, time windows, precedence, throughput) and translate them into solvers and heuristics. • Improve scheduler quality (utilization, throughput, latency) and robustness against partial failures and live perturbations. • Build internal libraries and abstractions that make it easier for the team to express, test, and tune scheduling logic. Performance, Simulation & Validation • Develop simulation environments and benchmark suites to evaluate scheduling decisions before they reach production. • Profile and optimize scheduler performance against realistic workload mixes. • Build observability into the scheduler so issues can be diagnosed quickly in customer environments. Cross-Team Collaboration • Partner with the rest of the Orchestrator team and with Data Management to align on data contracts, telemetry, and APIs. • Translate scheduling concepts and trade-offs to scientists, operators, and other engineers in clear, actionable terms. Minimum Requirements • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Operations Research, Industrial Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. • Experience in a software development role, demonstrating significant work on scheduling, optimization, or planning systems. • Strong proficiency in Python. • Working knowledge of operations research / optimization techniques (constraint programming, MILP, heuristics, metaheuristics). • Strong communication and collaboration skills. Preferred Capabilities and Experience We do not expect that any one candidate will have all of the following capabilities - each is independently a preferred or "nice-to-have" capability. • • Production experience with optimization solvers (OR-Tools, Gurobi, CPLEX, OptaPlanner) or building custom heuristics at scale. • Experience with discrete-event simulation. • Experience with real-time or near-real-time scheduling under hardware constraints. • Experience with Kar