Lab Operations Engineer

LIGHT LABS

Powering a healthier food system through data, transparency, and accountability.

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Lab Operations Engineer

Light Labs | Ann Arbor, MI (On-site, Lab)

The Opportunity

Are you a software or automation engineer who'd rather be on a lab floor than behind a screen? Someone who looks at a messy operation and sees a system waiting to be built? Then you'd be a great fit as our Lab Operations Engineer. You'll build what we call the Lab Operating System: the most modern, observable, controllable lab operation in the industry. Right now, it's a blank page. You'll own two outcomes, turnaround time and accuracy. That's the role.

Why Light Labs

Most labs sell turnaround time. We had to engineer it. Light Labs returns results in about three days where the industry takes seven to fourteen, and today a lot of that speed still depends on people who know where everything is.

That won't carry us where we're going. We're scaling to $50M by 2027 and $100M by 2028, and lab capacity is the constraint standing in the way, one we can't solve with headcount. We don't need someone to maintain what exists. We need someone to build what comes next.

What You'll Own

You'll walk into a high-volume, high-stakes environment with no playbook yet. Your first month is spent on the floor, mapping every process as a system, every checkpoint and every handoff, and standing up a single source of truth for how work actually moves. Then you find the first bottleneck and go after it. What you build first becomes the foundation for everything that follows:

• Build the source of truth. Real-time visibility into where every sample is, who owns it, and whether it's on track, no floor-walking required.

• Find the bottleneck, then kill it. Locate where time, capacity, or accuracy is being lost, fix it, measure the result, standardize it, repeat.

• Make turnaround time (TAT) predictable. Build the visibility to catch a late sample before it's late, not after.

• Build proactive quality management. Real-time trending and pattern detection for drift, QC failures, and out-of-spec results, so errors get caught in the lab instead of by a customer.

• Make partner labs measurable. Full visibility from shipped to released, with real SLAs and scorecards.

• Bring data to staffing. Replace reactive staffing with real numbers on coverage, cross-training, and utilization.

• Systematize method development. LLM-assisted workflows for literature review, protocol drafting, SOP generation, and validation.

• Build the playbook, not just the fix. Everything you build deploys on day one at our next lab, built or acquired.

You'll work side by side with our scientists, technicians, and lab leadership, and with engineering and product so the Lab OS plugs into the broader Light Labs platform instead of living on an island.

What You'll Need

• A real software or automation engineering background. You build systems, pipelines, and integrations other people can run and extend, not a script only you can maintain.

• Real time inside laboratory, scientific, manufacturing, or other complex physical-world operations. Pharma, biotech, analytical testing, laboratory automation, and high-throughput environments are all strong fits, and bioinformatics, computational biology, scientific software, or hands-on instrumentation experience is an even stronger one.

• A track record of replacing manual workflows with software or automation, personally, not just adjacent to the work, especially if that's an instrument-heavy process like LC-MS or involves pointing AI at a real scientific problem.

• You find the operational problem nobody's defined for you yet, build the fix, and prove it moved the needle, measurably, ideally on throughput, turnaround time, quality, or efficiency. That's what ownership of an outcome actually looks like here.

• Real communication skills. You'll be changing how scientists and technicians work. You'll need to explain the why and bring them along, not just go around them.

• Ready to be on the lab floor in Ann Arbor, MI. This is on-site, not remote.

Who We Are

Light Labs is building the modern platform for lab testing, starting with consumer goods brands: cheaper, faster testing that also automates regulatory compliance and drives revenue.

Testing is a cost line everywhere else. Here it's a growth line. Brands publish their Light Labs results straight to their own product pages, and those that do have seen conversion lift of around 12%. Hundreds of food and supplement brands already test with us, including AG1, Chomps, David Protein, Seed Health, Momentous, Caraway, and Little Spoon.

Consumers deserve to know what's actually in the products that affect their families' health, and transparency is what creates that informed customer. Beyond a faster, cheaper lab, we're building the infrastructure for brands to push lab data straight to their product pages (what's in it, what's not, claims verified) and automatically comply with regulations like Prop 65, CA AB 899, and Amazon's testing requirements.

That full loop, testing through customer-facing data, lets brands differentiate themselves and become the obvious choice in their category.

We run ISO 17025-accredited labs in Ann Arbor, MI and Salt Lake City, UT, with headquarters in Austin, TX. We're backed by 8VC and Valor Equity Partners, with CPG founders and strategics in the round. Everyone here, lab tech to engineer to sales, has a seat at the table in making the food system more transparent.

Our Mission

Everything we consume is getting more toxic and less nutritious, and the problem is invisible. You can't see, taste, or smell it:

• Cinnamon apple puree pouches, marketed for children and labeled preservative-free, kosher, and gluten-free, contained lead levels 200 times greater than the FDA's proposed guidelines.

• 87% of 650 children's food samples tested positive for glyphosate.

• Over 1,300 chemicals are banned in cosmetics in the EU, while only 11 are banned in the United States.

• The US allows thousands of food additives that are banned in other countries.

• A study of 168 baby foods found that 95% contained at least one heavy metal (arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium), with a quarter containing all four.

• Seven out of eight samples of kale tested contained disturbing levels of PFAs, with organic kale containing even higher levels of the toxic compounds.

Testing for purity today is slow, expensive, and nearly impossible to interpret without a PhD. No feedback loop means no pressure to change, but if people knew what was actually in their food, they'd shop differently. Nothing changes until someone can measure it, publish it, and be right. That's our mission: real transparency, built with the lab you'd be running.

Founding Team

• Nick Mares, 2x founder (Kettle & Fire, a $100M/year brand, and Upside Financing, exited 2022), $60M+ raised, CEO and COO experience, Thiel Fellow.

• Vijay Manohar, helped scale Samsara to $1B ARR and IPO (NYSE: IOT). B.S. computer engineering, UT Austin.

What You Get

• Top-decile salary, plus equity for every employee

• Full health, dental, and vision coverage

• Generous PTO and company holidays

• Direct access to the founders and a promote-from-within culture at a company that's adding labs, not consolidating them

Values We're Looking For

• First Principles. We're looking for team members who can deal with ambiguity, deconstruct problems, and build the optimal solution. Question every requirement, delete any part or process you can, simplify and optimize, accelerate cycle time, automate. That same instinct should make you curious enough to ask why something is done a certain way, and forward-looking enough to notice what won't hold up once we're 5 to 10 times this size.

• Standard of Excellence. High standards are contagious. A+ talent attracts A+ talent. There's a glut of mediocrity in the world. We're chasing after the products and people that strive for excellence.

• Bias for Action. Take initiative, make decisions quickly, and have a willingness to experiment and learn from failures. Customer expectations aren't static, they rise over time, which means we have to continuously improve every single day.

• Low Ego. Coachability: it's not about being right, it's about getting to the right answer. React calmly to criticism or negative feedback, treat feedback as an opportunity for information and improvement. Respectfully challenge decisions when you disagree, even when it's uncomfortable, and once a decision is made, commit wholly and move forward.

Why This Role

Are you the person who walks into a black box and builds order out of it? Roles like this don't come up often, and the people who can actually do it are rare. If that's you, this is your chance to build the Lab Operating System from the ground up. Apply today.

Light Labs is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.