R&D Systems Engineer - Pathogen

At the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), we’re on a mission to translate scientific discovery into real world impact. We bring together visionary scientists, technologists, engineers, researchers, educators and innovators to tackle humanity’s greatest challenges in four transformative areas:

• Health, Medical Science & Generative Biology
• Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture
• Climate Change & Managing CO₂
• Artificial Intelligence & Robotics

This is ambitious work - work that demands curiosity, courage, and a relentless drive to make a difference. At EIT, you’ll join a community built on excellence, innovation, tenacity, trust, and collaboration, where bold ideas become real-world breakthroughs. Together, we push boundaries, embrace complexity, and create solutions to scale ideas from lab to society. Explore more at www.eit.org.

Welcome to the Pathogen Project:

Within this ecosystem, the Pathogen Mission exemplifies EIT’s commitment to transformative science. It aims to revolutionise the diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases by leveraging whole genome sequencing (WGS)-based metagenomic and pathogen-specific analytical tools. This remit includes the development of a decentralised, sample-to-answer sequencing diagnostic platform for infectious diseases, enabling rapid and accurate analysis of patient samples without prior assumptions. Supported by Oracle Inc.’s cloud-computing scale and security infrastructure, the Pathogen Mission is progressing towards certified diagnostic products for deployment in laboratories, hospitals, and public health organisations worldwide.

Your Role:

At EIT we are seeking an experienced and detail orientated R&D Systems Engineer – Instrumentation & Data to help develop next-generation diagnostic technology. In this role, you’ll work alongside experts in microfluidics, microbiology, electronics and firmware to design, build and iterate prototype instrumentation for a point-of-care device capable of metagenomic sequencing through a microfluidic cartridge interface.

You will take a hands-on role in designing experiments, collecting and analysing performance data from prototype systems, and supporting data-driven engineering improvements within a collaborative R&D environment with evolving challenges. This position sits at the intersection of hardware, embedded control and data analysis. You will contribute directly to the development of decentralised diagnostic systems aimed at improving infectious disease detection in hospitals and public health settings worldwide.

 Key Responsibilities:

• Design and execute structured experiments to evaluate performance of cartridge-based modules and prototype instrumentation.
• Collect, analyse and interpret experimental data to identify performance trends, variability sources and failure modes.
• Develop analysis scripts and tools (e.g. Python-based) to process, visualise and report experimental results.
• Work closely with microfluidics, electronics and firmware engineers to interpret experimental findings and support system improvements.
• Support the implementation of reliable data acquisition from sensors and embedded control systems.
• Collaborate closely with microbiologists, microfluidics engineers and data scientists to translate experimental findings into system improvements by correlating mechanical, electrical and software behaviour with performance data.
• Contribute to defining test protocols and evaluating module performance against agreed targets.
• Support efforts to improve repeatability and robustness through structured data analysis.
• Maintain clear and structured documentation of experimental setups, configurations and analysis outputs.