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Salary: USD 140,000 - 180,000 / annual
Tetsuwan Scientific is building infrastructure to accelerate biological research by automating laboratory experimentation. The company has developed a user-friendly editor and compiler that converts scientists' protocol descriptions into executable code for robotic lab instruments, eliminating manual pipetting and improving reproducibility and precision.
You'll join a small, fast-growing team of three software engineers, an automation engineer, and work directly with founders and a designer. The monorepo codebase spans a compiler (OCaml), backend services (Python), and a protocol editor (TypeScript/React). You'll grow into working across the full stack, tackling complex interdisciplinary problems that go beyond typical web applications.
The core challenge involves converting freeform scientific protocols into reliable robot instructions—a problem combining compiler design, physical lab hardware constraints, context-sensitive language processing, domain expert knowledge, and deterministic correctness requirements. You'll take ambiguous problems, model solutions, ship features, and watch real scientists use your work. The role requires comfort jumping between languages and stack layers, strong opinions about code held loosely, and a desire to improve the codebase while maintaining engineering momentum.
The team is based in San Francisco's SoMa district and operates in-person. This is an opportunity to shape the product, team, and company at an early stage where individual decisions have outsized impact.
Requirements:
- 3+ years building software professionally
- Demonstrated experience taking fuzzy, ambiguous problems and turning them into working shipped features independently
- Comfortable jumping between languages and parts of the stack (OCaml not required on day one, but willingness to learn it is)
- Strong opinions about code, held loosely; desire to leave the codebase better than found while balancing momentum
- Preference for working in-person with small teams where product and engineering lines blur
Nice to have:
- Experience or interest in domain-specific languages, language design, and projectional editors
- Background in life sciences, lab automation, or software work in domains where users are domain experts
- Experience with OCaml or other ML-family languages (Haskell, F#, Rust's type system)
- Experience with Next.js, Tailwind, FastAPI, NeonDB, Zustand
- Experience or interest in compilers, interpreters, heuristic algorithms, and optimizing systems
- Familiarity with LLM-in-the-loop systems: parsing, structured extraction, evals
- Startup or small-team experience, especially earlier stage
