Join the EIT as a Software Engineer, building the software that makes autonomous laboratories work. You will be part of the AI and Robotics Institute, working within a multidisciplinary team of software, mechanical, electrical, robotics, and AI research engineers, alongside the plant scientists who are our users.
We are building the execution engine for autonomous laboratories. The central problem is that AI systems are stochastic and laboratory hardware is not. A robot arm holding a plate of live plant tissue needs bounded, repeatable, recoverable behaviour, while the agents deciding what to try next work nothing like that. Your work is the layer in between, turning an agent’s intent into a sequence of actions the lab can execute safely, holding it inside what the hardware and the biology allow, and handling what happens when something fails at three in the morning with a fortnight of growth on the line.
In practice that means scheduling work across instruments that cannot be in two places at once, defining the surface an agent is permitted to touch alongside what needs a human to sign it off, and giving scientists a way to describe a protocol and watch it run. A recurring theme is closing the loop, since assuming a command was obeyed is rarely good enough. Depending on the problem that might mean vision to confirm a dispense, force feedback to seat labware, or bounding the action space of a learned policy so its proposals can be validated before anything moves. We do not expect you to arrive with all of these. We do expect you to be the kind of engineer who is comfortable picking up an unfamiliar technique, trying it, and discarding it if it turns out to be the wrong answer.
The systems you write control real hardware doing real biology, so correctness, recoverability, and observability matter more here than they do in most software work.