A billion people live with obesity. They can't afford a $30/day GLP-1, but they could afford a $1/day one. What stands between those numbers is manufacturing. Anaula is building the operating system for autonomous biomanufacturing: cheap bioreactors that sense, control, and optimise living biology themselves, deployed as a fleet. If it works, it resets the cost floor for an entire category of medicine.
We're an exciting pre-seed biotech company: founder-led with a technical co-founding team and a contracted anchor customer in pharma. We prototype on the bench, run live cultures, and iterate. Fast, hands-on, no layers. We're looking for the engineer who owns the electronics and the control intelligence that makes the reactor autonomous, and grows with us from the first prototype to global scale.
The roleYou'll own two things that are really one problem: the electronics that run the reactor, and the control system that makes it think. Today we have prototype-grade code. You'll build the real control stack from the ground up, with the hardware it runs on. Founding role: you set the architecture, and what you build becomes the foundation every future reactor runs on.
The signature challengeThe hard part is automated scaling. A bioprocess that works in a small reactor normally takes a specialist team months to re-engineer for each larger scale, and again for every unit in the field. We're building a control stack that does it automatically: a process transfers from bench to production scale, and across a fleet of reactors, without manual re-tuning each time. Solving that is what turns cheap hardware into an autonomous manufacturing platform. You'd own it.
What you'll buildThe core stack: the real-time control, automated scale-up logic, and optimisation system that runs the reactor fleet. Our core edge.
Custom hardware: mixed-signal PCBs and embedded subsystems for distributed, closed-loop LED light control, sensing, and actuation.
Systems integration: power, sensor, and actuator networks (DC rails/protection/EMI, optical/pH/DO/temp/flow sensing, LEDs, pumps, valves, gas/feed).
Firmware: robust embedded firmware for control loops, data acquisition, fault handling, and communications (serial/CAN/RS-485/Ethernet).
Bring-up and validation: test fixtures, bring-up procedures, and validation for repeatability and safety.
Experience: 3 to 6 years hands-on (or the absolute chops to match it).
Hardware design: full-cycle PCB design (schematic capture, layout, DFM/DFT in EDA tools) with strong mixed-signal fundamentals.
Firmware fluency: strong bare-metal or RTOS C/C++ for microcontrollers, handling standard peripherals (ADC, PWM, SPI/I2C, UART, timers, interrupts).
Control systems: practical PID, system identification, real-time scheduling, and stability. Core to the role, not a bonus.
Sensor integration: conditioning, filtering, calibration, noise mitigation.
Debugging: fluent with scope and logic analyser across hardware, firmware, and system-level interactions.
Startup temperament: high agency, comfort with ambiguity, real end-to-end ownership, and a desire to build a company, not just a board.
Industrial automation (Modbus/CAN/Ethernet, safety interlocks) · rigorous EMC/EMI shielding and grounding · design for manufacturing and test · scientific instruments, biotech, or other safety-critical hardware · higher-level software fluency.
What success looks likeThe reactor runs fully autonomously and produces trustworthy data. Predictable control loops hold the culture where it should be without human intervention.
Boards are designed for manufacturability and fast iteration, and the electronics-and-control function becomes a scalable foundation, with you growing into the leader of it.
If you want to own the hardest, most interesting problem in autonomous biomanufacturing and build a company around it, apply, and send us something you've built. Tell us what you designed, how you debugged it, what failed, and how you made it reliable. We care more about that than your CV.
If "teaching a fleet of reactors to scale a living process by themselves" sounds like the most interesting problem you've heard this month, we should talk.
