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UX Designer

Design jobs at Ginkgo Bioworks

Ginkgo Bioworks

About Ginkgo Bioworks

Ginkgo’s mission is to make biology easier to engineer. We program cells to make everything from food to materials to therapeutics. Ginkgo bioengineers use our foundry—a custom-built, centralized set of robotic lab equipment and software—to build new organisms for making natural products, pharmaceuticals, biofuels, and more. We're creating the code base, compiler and debugger for biology. Success in this evolving field is only possible with teams that represent diverse people, ideas, experiences, and ways of working. We’re an equal opportunity employer and encourage people of all backgrounds to apply.

About the Role

Contributing to Ginkgo’s mission to make biology easy to engineer, the User Experience (UX) team builds elegant, intuitive, and consistent interfaces that streamline the completion of scientific workflows. We’re growing our team to take the user experience of Ginkgo’s custom software to the next level as we work to build the synthetic biology platform of the future.

As a UX Designer, you’ll leverage your design skills to bring our product designs to life. As the champion of our design system, you will work with product managers, engineers, biologists, and a top notch UX team to expand the scale of our impact across the company. 

To facilitate this collaboration, you’ll be working in a Hybrid environment (Hybrid In-Office model, with up to 2 days work from home per week) at our headquarters in the exciting Seaport District of Boston. 

About You

You are curious. When you don’t know something, you ask. You love tackling complex problems. You have the flexibility to apply design standards (even from other domains) but you also know when to break the mold and develop entirely new interaction models. As a creative problem solver, you think about design as a way to improve people’s lives. You have an eye for visual design, but never forget your users’ needs, and you value consistency because it helps your users. You enjoy creating pattern libraries and you are always looking for the opportunity to build a design system.

As our software is internal, this means that all of our users are right here on site. You’ll be working with them in workshops and user research sessions to uncover unmet needs, iterate your designs, and solve for pain-points. You’ll have the opportunity to apply your passion for design to both biology and scientific software. You will be making biology easier to engineer.

Please include a link to your portfolio in your application.

Responsibilities

    • Take point on creating an intuitive pattern library and design system
    • Create and iterate on UX design concepts, interactive prototypes and hand-off specifications for our software and automation tools
    • Create prototypes, test with users, and collect feedback to identify usability improvements and design challenges
    • Maintain strong partnerships with stakeholders and developers throughout the entire design process

Minimum Requirements

    • Bachelor’s degree in UX Design, Visual Design, or a related field
    • 3+ years of design experience
    • Strong visual design skills and a keen eye for typography and information hierarchy
    • Advocate for and practitioner of Human Centered Design, Design Thinking methodologies and Universal Design principles
    • Working understanding of design research to evaluate prototypes
    • Enthusiasm for contributing to UX team processes and best practices, including our design system and pattern library
    • Enthusiasm for the role! You will be working with some of the best scientists and engineers to develop software tools that solve never-before-seen scientific challenges

Preferred Experience and Capabilities

    • Experience designing for scientific or data-intensive software, physical products, automation systems, or complex services
    • Understanding of front end engineering concepts and fluency with basic coding
    • Previous work with software development teams and Agile frameworks
    • Experience creating data visualizations for technical applications
    • Past experience with or a strong curiosity about biology and/or life sciences
    • Master’s degree or higher in UX design or a related field
To learn more about our Software Team and how we're growing Ginkgo's platform, check out our team page. as well as some of the team's blog posts:

To learn more about Ginkgo, check out some recent press:

We also feel that it’s important to point out the obvious here – there’s a serious lack of diversity in our industry, and that needs to change. Our goal is to help drive that change. Ginkgo is deeply committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in all of its practices, especially when it comes to growing our team. Our culture promotes inclusion and embraces how rewarding it is to work with people from all walks of life.  

We’re developing a powerful biological engineering platform, so we must remain mindful of the many ways our technology can – and will – impact people around the world. We care about how our platform is used, and having a diverse team to build it gives us the best chance that it’s something we’ll be proud of as it continues to grow. Therefore, it’s critical that we incorporate the diverse voices and visions of all those who play a role in the future of biology.

It is the policy of Ginkgo Bioworks to provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and employment applicants.
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