Synthace Limited

Named as a "Technology Pioneer" by the World Economic Forum, Synthace's goal is to raise universal bioscience productivity, enabling people to better engineer biology for health, food, energy and manufacturing.

Central to our technology is Antha, our groundbreaking cloud based platform.

Antha uses automation and workflows to drive vast improvements in the speed, cost and reliability of developing biotechnology, linking lab equipment, protocols and processes, thereby allowing vast and speedy development, enhancing productivity for any bioscience.

We're effectively building a visual IDE that interacts with an automation hub to simplify interactions with existing robotic lab equipment and improve visualisation of data that comes from complex multi-factorial experiments.

All of this drives vast improvements in the speed, cost and reliability of developing biotechnology, linking lab equipment, protocols and processes, thereby allowing vast and speedy development, enhancing productivity for any bioscience.

We've been named...

★ "Technology Pioneer" - World Economic Forum - http://widgets.weforum.org/techpioneers-2016/

★ One of "Europe’s 100 digital champions" - FT, Google - https://synthace.com/blog/2018/11/23/synthace-named-as-one-of-europes-100-digital-pioneers

★ "2018 Cool Vendor in Life Sciences" - Gartner - https://synthace.com/blog/2018/6/19/synthace-named-a-2018-cool-vendor-in-life-sciences-by-gartner.

Culture

We have a very high technical bar. We have inspiring, amazing people working here, and we share knowledge with each other. all. the. time!

We're bringing together a team of highly skilled and collaborative engineers and scientists from leading tech companies and start-ups (Google, Facebook, Deepmind, etc. and people who have authored cool stuff like RabbitMQ). We're moving out of our start-up phase and addressing the last remaining areas of tech-debt (fun challenges if you're into that sort of thing), and moving towards an architecture based around high performance microservices using Go, Kubernetes and Google Cloud Platform.

We're a friendly, supportive and inclusive bunch. We have regular company lunches, games nights and other events. We hold weekly lunch and learn sessions to help those of us without PhDs in various scientific subjects to understand more about the world of biology, to help us see how our work will directly impact the researchers who use it.

It may sound cheesy to some, but we are all very much bought into our mission; creating a platform that helps scientists to speed up their research into amazing things like curing Cancer faster, researching drought-resistant crops to reduce hunger - changing the world for the better!

Our Tech Stack

• Back End: Microservices, Kubernetes Federation, Go, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Docker, Google Data Store & Ansible
• Front End: Typescript, React.js, Node.js, Postgres, GraphQL
• Drivers & Lab Automation: .Net Core, C#, ASP.Net, APIs (high level drivers, embedded systems / hardware experience also useful)
• Bioinformatics: Python, Go, Java, C, C++, BLAST, R, PANDAS/NumPy/SciPy, SAS/JMP

Our Engineering Interviewing Process

We use a simple 4 stage process:-

1. Initial 30 minute Phone Screen with our internal recruitment team. We'll ask a couple of technical questions, but the main purpose of this call is to understand more about your interests and strengths, and to share more information about Synthace. It's a two way conversation to discover if we're right for you.
2. Online Skills Test. We know there are split opinions about coding tests, but we have a really high technical bar and this is one way of ensuring everyone has the same level of core skills.
3. Technical Video Interview. This is a 45 minute session, during which you'll talk through and solve a coding problem with one of our engineering team. It also gives you a chance to discuss the challenges they're working on, and where you could potentially have the most impact.
4. On-site Assessment. This involves 4 back to back 45 minute interviews and a 30 minute tour of our lab. There are 2 coding interviews and 1 architecture interview - all using whiteboards - as well as a behavioural interview. You'll get to check out the office, meet a cross section of the team(s) you'd be working with, and see how your work would directly impact the Lab team.

Your experience is important to us, and we try to give feedback quickly at each stage, including making offer decisions within 48 hours of the final interview in most cases.

If you have any questions at any point in the process, please reach out to the recruitment team.