Job Description

IFF is looking for a Life Science Software Engineer to accelerate our efforts and we hope it’s you!

IFF’s Health & Biosciences division is a global leader in biotechnology. The IFF laboratories in Leiden have a long and dynamic history that goes back to the beginnings of modern biotechnology, to become the world market leader in sustainable bio-solutions. The R&D team in Leiden houses 32 creative, multi-disciplinary scientists from 13 different nationalities.

Our R&D team develops microbial production strains and engineer enzymes for applications in the areas of food & beverages, home & personal care, animal feed, paper & textile processing, and more. We implement all steps in the process, from business idea and the use of generative AI to sample genetic diversity, to assay design, high-throughput screening, full-scale testing and manufacture at our production plants.

We are a full-stack team of biotechnologists and enzyme engineers that design and produce enzymes for a large selection of industrial applications.

Enzyme engineering is undergoing a paradigm shift thanks to lab automation and AI solutions. We are early adopters and are already reaping benefits of our investments. Now we are ready for the next step and are overhauling our workflows to streamline them for an end-to-end data-driven R&D process.

We are looking for an experienced engineer at the interfaces of software development, lab automation and biology. As part of our team, you will create software that automates everything that can be automated and ensures that generated data is structured and accessible.

In our team, machine learning staff, molecular biologists, biochemists, and automation hardware engineers work side-by-side. Improvements are deployed with minimal delay, and you can expect to have large impact on the value of our products.

As Life Science Software Engineer, you will help to create the stack that implements our domain logic, and how it communicates with storage backends as well as instruments, liquid handlers and fermenters. You have freedom to find preferred 3rd party technologies as well as deciding on the components that you prefer us to develop internally.

The Leiden R&D team is highly skilled and operates with a start-up mentality and a sharp focus on continuous improvement.

We offer

The opportunity to grow professionally and to develop a long career in Biotech

Position in a dynamic team of inspired, innovative and highly skilled scientists

An energetic work environment created by inclusive and multicultural team

The opportunity to grow professionally and to develop a career in Biotechnology

Competitive salary and attractive compensation and benefits, such as:

Individual Choice Budget of 8% of the annual base salary, employee choice to be paid in monthly instalments or to exchange for additional time off up to 15 extra days per year

25 vacation days and 3 bridge days, of which 2 of them are determined by the employer

Annual Incentive Plan

Responsibilities and Tasks

Design data models to support experimental protocols and write software that automates the generation of robot instructions as well as analysis and visualization of biological sequence-, and screening-data.

Maintain workflows and be pro-active in adjusting and improving them as experimental techniques evolve.

Identify and onboard 3rd party services and tools to offload responsibilities and let us focus on differentiating activities.

Create software that allows us to seamlessly integrate our Laboratory Information Management System (Benchling) and ML Ops.

Document, communicate and teach colleagues best-practices.

Job Requirements

Required

A Bachelor's, Master's or PhD degree in a relevant technical field.

Passion and documented experience with writing high-quality, structured and maintainable code (we mostly code in Python).

Affinity and practical experience with the biosciences.

Experience with dev(git)/ops (we use AWS and EKS for hosting).

It would be great if you

Have familiarity with data visualization and elementary statistics for interpreting noise and variability.

Are familiar Domain-Driven software Design (DDD).

Event based services.

Have a background in protein engineering.

We emphasize reaching goals through a collaborative effort. It is essential that you can use your good interpersonal and communication skills to achieve results. together with others.

Fluency in spoken and written English is expected.

IFF is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

At IFF, we believe that your uniqueness unleashes our potential. We value the diverse mosaic of the ethnicity, national origin, race, age, sex or veteran status. We strive for inclusive workplace that allows each of our colleagues to bring their authentic self to work regardless of their religion, gender identity & expression, sexual orientation, or disability.