Software Engineer, Automation and Control

About Us:

Culture’s mission is to simplify and accelerate bioprocess development to enable our customers to bring their biopharmaceutical products to market faster.

With a focus on upstream cell culture process development, Culture has developed a unique platform that merges products, services and data management that can be applied to mammalian, microbial and viral vector production processes. This platform enables high-throughput process development projects to be rapidly and seamlessly executed directly by our customers in their own facilities, in our service laboratories, or both, all driven by our cloud-connected web application, accessible from anywhere, for designing, managing and analyzing experiments.

At Culture, we combine our passions for biomanufacturing, engineering, and operations to build new solutions that make bioprocess development faster. We value curiosity, communication, collaboration, a customer focused mindset and a drive for results.

The Opportunity: 

We're looking for a Software Engineer who has experience in automation and controls to design, build, and maintain automation systems for our Bioreactor and Bioprocessing business. This person is comfortable with physical systems, has a deep understanding of control loop

theory, and comes with a strong focus in controls, closed-loop system behavior, and PID-based control strategies. When a temperature control starts to oscillate, you can dive in, look at the traces, have a working theory of where the feedback loop went wrong, and come up with

solutions to compensate and add margin to the design.

The role is more than just PID tuning. You will own everything from the interface of our Cloud software through the low-level control of a physical device (from Ethernet to USB). This role will work across software, hardware, and systems teams to develop reliable automation solutions

for complex physical systems, improve process performance, and enable scalable, repeatable operation. Our software controls physical processes that run for days at a time, where failures can ruin an expensive experiment.

What You’ll Do:

• Tune and troubleshoot control loops in real-world environments, including diagnosing oscillation, lag, overshoot, and instability. Improve automation reliability through monitoring, logging, fault detection, and recovery mechanisms.
• Evolve our AsyncAPI hardware interface so higher-level automation and AI systems can safely interact with physical equipment, with explicit permissions, validation, and fail-safe behavior.
• Continuously improve the tuning and failure modes of our existing control loops and develop and optimize new feedback control systems, including PID control loops, for stability, performance, and robustness.
• Build software interfaces for sensors, actuators, embedded controllers, and higher-level orchestration systems.
• Partner with mechanical, electrical, process, and software engineers to translate system requirements into reliable control implementations.
• Learn about biotechnology and bioprocess development

About You:

• 4+ years of industry experience including 2+ years developing software.
• Working knowledge of sensors, actuators, and data acquisition, and the ways they fail.
• Strong understanding of classical control theory, especially PID control, feedback loops, stability, response tuning, and disturbance rejection.
• Strong working relationship with scientists and the ability to translate process requirements into control logic.
• You care about technical rigor: testing assumptions, validating behavior against data, and understanding failure modes rather than stopping at "it works."
• Strong systems thinking and ability to work across hardware and software boundaries.
• You're kind, curious, and enjoy learning new things.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience in robotics, manufacturing automation, biotech automation, or other complex electromechanical systems.
• Professional software engineering experience, including CI and automated testing.
• AWS, Docker, infrastructure as code, or connected edge devices.
• Exposure to regulated environments (GLP/GMP, ISO).
• Familiarity with sampling, filtering, sensor noise, and actuator constraints.

Location & Schedule: 

• This position is based in our South San Francisco office and will be required to be on site 3 days a week Monday through Friday.

Base Salary Range:

• Culture Biosciences's compensation package includes market competitive salary, equity for all full time roles, and great benefits. Our expected base salary range for this role is $130,000-$165,000. We are hiring for multiple levels and backgrounds so final offers may vary within the range provided based on experience, expertise, and other factors.

Benefits:

• Competitive salary and equity compensation
• Medical, Dental, Vision, and Life insurance
• Medical and Dependent Care FSA (prorated based on start-date)
• 401(k) plan with company match
• Responsible Time Off (non-accrual based) policy, 11 paid company holidays and a week-long winter break
• 12 weeks of parental leave at full salary

Culture Biosciences provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants. We seek to build a company that promotes inclusion and expands the diversity of our industry as a whole. We encourage people with identities underrepresented in biotech and technology to apply.