Principal Automation Engineer, Parallel Bio - San Diego

lab automation; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 100,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Parallel Bio in San Diego is seeking a leader for lab automation to design and operate high-throughput facilities for organoid experiments. This foundational role requires building a skilled team and directly collaborating with software engineers to create a fully automated lab environment. Candidates should have strong technical expertise in automation systems and be prepared for a hands-on leadership role. This position offers a potential path to senior leadership as the company expands.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in laboratory automation and design of high-throughput experiments.
• Strong leadership skills with a focus on building and improving lab automation teams.
• Technical expertise in automation architecture, networking, and data capture.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and operation of high-throughput facilities for organoid experiments.
• Create and lead a team that excels in modern lab automation.
• Design and build an end-to-end automated lab environment.

Job description

At Parallel Bio, we are using the immune system to unlock safer, more effective drugs. By creating access to genuine human biology in a diverse, reproducible, and scalable way we’re changing the way researchers find, test, refine, and deliver these life‑changing therapies.

The human immune system is the master regulator of health and disease in our bodies. Current tools used to discover drugs that target the immune system are wildly inadequate. To fix this critical gap, Parallel Bio created a human ‘immune system in a dish’ to rapidly accelerate the development of new drugs and immunotherapies more likely to work in patients. This means developing drugs that are known to safely work in humans before the first patient receives the first dose and an end to needlessly destroying millions of lab animals in the pursuit of human health.

By blending this biological innovation with the latest in high-throughput lab automation and integrated data capture & analysis, we’re creating a new type of biotech – one that brings the advantages of cloud computing to next‑generation wet lab studies.

The Role

This role is a foundational role for Parallel Bio. We are executing a strategy that scales up novel immune organoids with automation to enable fully automated experiments of human immune response. The longitudinal studies we perform across diverse populations of human biology are only achievable using the precision, scale, and consistency of automation.

The immediate high‑level goals for the person in this role are twofold:

• Lead the design, building, and operation of high‑throughput facilities for our organoid experiments.
• Create a team that excels at building, operating, and continuously improving modern lab automation.

While this is a leadership role, it will be a hands‑on automation role for the next phase of the company’s development. You will be expected to be a technically‑creative architect of automation, fluent in every level of the stack from power and networking to data capture and reagent management. You will be iteratively designing and building an end‑to‑end automated lab environment in close collaboration with a team of experienced software engineers.

This role reports directly to the Head of Technology and is a potential path to senior leadership as the company grows.