Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer. Ginkgo is constructing, editing, and redesigning the living world in order to answer the globe’s growing challenges in health, energy, food, materials, and more. Our bioengineers make use of an in-house automated foundry for designing and building new organisms. 

 

Senior Engineer I, Computational Synthetic Chemist

Boston, Massachusetts

About Ginkgo Datapoints

Ginkgo Datapoints, a business unit within Ginkgo Bioworks, is ushering in the coming era of AI-backed biotechnology breakthroughs. By leveraging Ginkgo’s automation and digital infrastructure, Datapoints builds high-quality, large-scale datasets and technical capabilities that accelerate drug discovery and development.

The Small Molecules team is looking for a synthetic organic chemist to support computationally enabled synthetic chemistry. This role sits between the high-throughput and direct-to-biology core and the cheminformatics function, connecting route design, practical synthesis, reaction prediction, automated experimentation, and structured data capture.

Role Overview

We are hiring a Senior Engineer I, Synthetic Chemistry to design and execute multi-step syntheses of novel drug-like molecules, including singleton analogs and small focused sets that cannot be made in plate format.

You will own route selection, execution, purification, and characterization end to end. Computational route planning, retrosynthesis, condition prediction, and automated or high-throughput experimentation resources will be standard working tools—not occasional aids. You will consume model output, judge when it is useful, correct it when it is not, and feed outcomes back into the planning and prediction workflows.

The ideal candidate is an accomplished bench chemist who is also fluent in computer-aided synthesis planning (CASP), reaction-prediction tools, and reaction data. You will be the resident synthetic-chemistry judgment for this part of the design–make–test loop and will mentor junior chemists using the same tools. This is not a software or ML research position; it is a chemistry role for someone who wants to make computational workflows genuinely useful in practice.

Key Responsibilities

Multi-step synthesis and compound delivery

• Design, select, and execute practical multi-step routes to novel drug-like singleton compounds and focused sets under real constraints on time, materials, building blocks, and available resources.