Member of Technical Staff, Product Engineer

Warp; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Warp is seeking an experienced full-stack software engineer to take technical ownership of software connecting people to autonomous laboratories in South San Francisco. You will own end-to-end workflows from planning through execution, including frontend, backend, APIs, and data models, with hands-on production responsibilities and mentoring responsibilities.

You will lead multi-month initiatives, collaborate with chemists and customers, and ensure reliable, scalable systems.

Qualifications

• Experience delivering and maintaining production web applications (frontend, backend, APIs, data models).
• Led significant projects from ambiguous problem to production adoption with measurable impact.
• Experience as a technical lead coordinating multiple engineers over months.
• Strong foundations in reliability, performance, and maintainability of software.
• Product sense and user-experience judgment; translate user needs into scope and deliverables.
• Excellent communication of plans and tradeoffs to engineers and non-engineers.

Responsibilities

• Lead full-stack delivery of scientific workflows, from understanding user needs through architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, and operation.
• Scope initiatives spanning multiple months and engineers; write designs, identify risks, and break into milestones.
• Work with chemists and customers to capture objectives and translate into usable workflows for automated experimentation.
• Build interfaces, backend services, APIs, and data models connecting planning, robotic execution, and analysis.
• Own reliability and maintainability; add tests, monitor, investigate failures, balance speed and debt.
• Make experiment status and results understandable; use feedback to improve completion and reduce manual effort.
• Provide technical leadership through architecture discussions, code reviews, and mentoring; use AI tools to accelerate work.

Skills

Full-stack development

Frontend development

Backend services

APIs

Data modeling

Code reviews

Mentoring

AI development tools

Reliability and performance

Tools

AI tooling

Monitoring & testing

Job description

About Warp

At Warp Sciences, our mission is to help the world discover new medicines faster and build the capacity to do it here in America. We bring AI, robotics, and life sciences together in automated labs that design, run, and learn from experiments, with each experiment making the next one better. We’re not developing drugs of our own. We’re building the infrastructure for the people who do.

We're looking for an experienced full-stack software engineer to take technical ownership of the software that connects people to our autonomous laboratories. In this product engineering role, you'll own staff- and customer-facing workflows from scientific objectives and experiment planning through execution and results, with hands-on responsibility for the frontend, backend services, APIs, and data models.

You'll combine AI-native full-stack engineering with strong product sense: work directly with chemists, researchers, operators, and customers, decide what to build, and carry it through to reliable production use. We're looking for someone who has already led substantial software initiatives and can turn an open-ended problem into a technical plan, ship it, and improve it based on real use.

What You'll Do

• Lead full-stack delivery of scientific workflows, from understanding user needs and defining scope through architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, and ongoing operation.

• Independently scope initiatives spanning multiple months and engineers. Write technical designs, identify dependencies and risks, and break the work into milestones that deliver useful software along the way.

• Work directly with chemists and customers to capture objectives, constraints, procedures, and exceptions. Translate those needs into clear requirements and usable workflows for automated experimentation.

• Build user interfaces, backend services, APIs, and data models that connect experiment planning, robotic execution, and analysis. Work with other engineers to integrate across our internal systems.

• Own the reliability and maintainability of what you ship. Add tests and monitoring, investigate production failures, and make deliberate tradeoffs among delivery speed, performance, and technical debt.

• Make experiment status, results, uncertainty, and failures understandable so users can investigate problems and guide automated work. Use feedback and usage data to improve task completion and reduce manual effort.

• Provide technical leadership through architecture discussions, code reviews, and mentoring while continuing to write production code. Use AI development tools to accelerate work and verify the correctness of their output.

What We're Looking For

We're looking for someone who has set technical direction for a product area, independently identified and scoped important problems, and led multiple engineers through delivery while remaining hands-on. You should be able to point to substantial systems you personally helped build, the decisions you owned, and the outcomes they delivered.

• You're an experienced full-stack engineer who has delivered and maintained production web applications, with substantial hands-on contributions to frontend interfaces, backend services, APIs, and data models.

• You've personally led significant projects from an ambiguous problem to production adoption, with impact across a product area or team. You can explain what you owned and implemented, the tradeoffs you made, and how the work improved user or business outcomes.

• You've served as a technical lead for work involving multiple engineers over multiple months: defining the approach, sequencing delivery, coordinating dependencies, and staying accountable through launch and follow-up.

• You have strong software engineering foundations and have designed systems for reliability, performance, and maintainability. You can point to architectural decisions you've made and how those decisions held up in production.

• You demonstrate product sense and sound judgment about user experience. You've worked directly with users, identified the underlying problem, and made scope and interaction decisions that helped them accomplish their work.

• You communicate technical plans and tradeoffs clearly to engineers and non-engineers, and have helped other engineers deliver better work through code review, technical guidance, and mentoring.

• You use AI development tools effectively and critically, with responsibility for understanding, testing, and maintaining the resulting code.

• You've operated software after launch, used monitoring and user feedback to diagnose problems, and followed through on fixes and improvements.

• Prior experience with chemistry or the life sciences is not required; curiosity and enthusiasm for learning are mandatory.

Helpful, but Not Required

Experience in any of the following is a plus:

• Scientific software, laboratory workflows, or tools for technical users.

• Domain knowledge in chemistry, drug discovery, or related scientific disciplines.

• Robotics, automation, or products that interact with physical systems.

• Complex workflow tools, operational interfaces, or collaborative applications.

• Data visualization, experiment tracking, and communicating uncertainty.

• AI-powered products and interfaces for guiding, reviewing, or correcting automated work.

Example Problems You Might Work On

• Build a workflow for customers to specify scientific goals, constraints, and success criteria that our experiment-planning systems can act on.

• Turn a chemist's procedure, including exceptions and judgment calls, into a reviewable plan for robotic execution.

• Build an experiment monitoring and results interface that helps users understand uncertainty, intervene when needed, and use what they learned to plan the next experiment.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Warp is an equal opportunity employer. We consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and related medical conditions), gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, military or veteran status, reproductive health decision‑making, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Reasonable Accommodations

Warp provides reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants with disabilities in accordance with applicable law. If you need an accommodation during the application or interview process, please contact [e-mail].

Fair Chance Hiring

Warp considers qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records in accordance with the California Fair Chance Act and other applicable laws.

General Notice

This job posting describes the position generally and does not constitute an offer of employment or an employment contract.