Staff Software Engineer, Lab Platform & Automation

Grailbio; Durham (NC); Hybrid; USD 147,000 - 195,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible work arrangement

On-site collaboration days

Hybrid work model

Job summary

GRAIL's Lab Software team seeks a Senior or Staff Software Engineer in Durham, NC or Sunnyvale, CA to design, build, and operate the software systems powering automated laboratories. You will work across services such as laboratory workflow orchestration, LIMS, quality decision systems, and visibility tools to enable safe, scalable patient sample processing.

You'll balance reliability, regulatory compliance, and operational simplicity while mentoring teammates and shaping architectural

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals with experience designing and operating distributed systems.
• Experience building production software using one or more modern programming languages such as Python or Go.
• Experience with frontend development using React and TypeScript.
• Experience developing cloud-native applications on AWS.
• Experience building APIs and distributed services using REST and/or gRPC.
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native deployment practices.
• Strong understanding of software quality, testing, observability, and operational ownership.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate across engineering, science, and laboratory operations.
• Experience with observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana, structured logging) and on-call ownership.

Responsibilities

• As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll design, build, and operate the software systems that power GRAIL's automated laboratories.
• You'll work across services including laboratory workflow orchestration, LIMS, quality decision systems, and laboratory visibility tools that enable operators to safely process patient samples at scale.
• The challenges you'll solve extend well beyond traditional backend software development. You'll collaborate closely with laboratory operators, scientists, automation engineers, and software engineers to understand complex laboratory workflows and build systems that remain reliable under real‑world operating conditions.
• This work requires balancing reliability, scalability, regulatory compliance, and operational simplicity. You'll design software that recovers gracefully from failures, supports 24‑hour laboratory operations, improves operator efficiency, and enables the laboratory to continue evolving as new assays and technologies are introduced.
• You'll help build resilient distributed systems that interact with physical laboratory equipment, support software‑only disaster recovery, and continuously improve the intelligence and efficiency of the laboratory platform.

Skills

Distributed systems

Python or Go

React and TypeScript

AWS

APIs and gRPC

Kubernetes

Software quality and observability

Cross-functional communication

Observability tooling

Job description

GRAIL's Lab Software team seeks a Senior or Staff Software Engineer in Durham, NC or Sunnyvale, CA to design, build, and operate the software systems powering automated laboratories. You will work across services such as laboratory workflow orchestration, LIMS, quality decision systems, and visibility tools to enable safe, scalable patient sample processing.

You'll balance reliability, regulatory compliance, and operational simplicity while mentoring teammates and shaping architectural