Lab Manager

Omen AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Omen AI in San Francisco seeks a Lab Manager to lead our new in-person lab operations, ensuring rigorous QA/QC, calibration, and data integrity for our field-deployable spectroscopy hardware. You will integrate sample preparation workflows, automate lab tasks with our R&D team, manage procurement for consumables, and enforce safety and environmental compliance as we scale.

This role requires a chemistry or analytical chemistry background, with openness to biology and strong problem-solving in a

Qualifications

• A professional background in chemistry or analytical chem is strongly preferred. Bio experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Establish Lab Standards: Bring the rigor of a professional analytical chemistry lab to our R&D facility, including QA/QC practices, blanks, calibration curves, spike recoveries, and drift monitoring.
• Integrate: Develop robust sample preparation methodologies for challenging fluids; handle day-to-day processing and testing while building the automated pipeline.
• Automate: Collaborate with R&D to transition manual prep/testing into a software-defined automated pipeline and define analytical workflows for robots to execute.
• Supply Chain & Inventory: Manage procurement for lab consumables, reagents, gases, and calibration standards; assist in equipment procurement for adjacent tools.
• Safety & Compliance: Establish and enforce safety protocols and hazardous waste management, ensuring compliance with local environmental regulations.

Skills

Analytical chemistry

Job description

Lab Manager

Location: San Francisco (In-person)

Who We Are

Omen is miniaturizing lab-grade spectroscopy into field-deployable embedded sensors. Our systems deliver PPM-level trace analysis reports on the fluids in industrial machines and datacenters, allowing us to detect complex wear trends like hydraulic cylinder failures or coolant contamination in real-time. With this data we can automatically match anomalies with failure modes weeks to months before catastrophic failure occurs.

Our team is a tightly knit group of ~20 builders, dropouts, and industry veterans. We don’t build things that are good enough, we build things that are 100x better.

The Challenge

We are currently developing two primary systems: Omen Scout: for closed-loop hydraulic and lubricating oils. Omen Sentry: for direct-to-chip liquid cooling loops (typ. water/glycol mixtures).

To validate our portable hardware and train our predictive machine learning models, we need a high volume of ground-truth data. We are in the process of building our lab; we need a tech-forward expert to own it and bring professional analytical chemistry standards into our fast moving startup environment.

What You Will Do

Establish Lab Standards: Bring the rigor of a professional analytical chemistry lab to our R&D facility. Our machine learning and hardware teams rely entirely on your results as their ground truth. You must implement rigorous QA/QC practices, including running blanks, calibration curves, spike recoveries, and monitoring for instrument drift.

Integrate: Develop robust sample preparation methodologies for challenging fluids (industrial oils and liquid cooling mixtures). You will handle the day-to-day processing and testing of these samples while we build out the automated pipeline.

Automate: Collaborate closely with the R&D team to transition manual sample prep and testing into a software-defined automated pipeline. You will help define the analytical workflows and test plans that our SCARA robots will execute.

Supply Chain & Inventory: Manage procurement for all lab consumables, reagents, specialty gases, and calibration standards. Assist in management/procurement for adjacent equipment like resin 3d printers.

Safety & Compliance: Establish and enforce safety protocols. You will independently set up our hazardous waste management streams (acid waste, solvent waste, oil disposal) and ensure compliance with local environmental regulations.

What We Are Looking For

A professional background in chemistry or analytical chem is strongly preferred, with bio experience as a plus. We are open to candidates from a primarily biology-oriented background provided you have some experience with organic and/or physical chemistry.

Why Omen?

We take the physics seriously, but we don’t let red tape slow us down. If you want to own a fascinating chemistry problem from the ground up and build something that protects the most expensive infrastructure on the planet, we want to talk to you.