Shoot me a message at raphael@atomic.ai if you want to learn more.
So I spent more than 8 years as a SWE at Google, and now work here with both experimental biologists and machine learning scientists. And yes, a lot of the concerns mentioned in this thread are also things I have had anxiety about.
Most obvious to me, being a software engineer at Google felt like being the center of the universe. Coming here, the focus is the scientific research. And yes, the scientists all managed to complete their PhDs so they don't necessarily need me to unblock them every second of their day. But contrary to my expectations, this has been remarkably freeing. I think one particularly important part of our company that makes this work is that, even on the science side, we're multidisciplinary (at a high level, emphasizing both experimental biology and ML.) And so engineering feeling like another arm of that multi-discipline nature is fairly... natural.
The reason I feel it's freeing, and the reason I enjoy working here, is also the greatest challenge. Because the scientists are focused on the science, because they respect me and trust me to figure it out, and because they aren't constantly blocked by me, my job is mostly about dreaming extremely expansively about what I can do to reduce toil and make the scientists more productive. Of course they have feedback and input, but how I use my time and what I build is ultimately my decision because I am the engineer. And I have been able to do some things I am very proud of, like rolling out Bazel and Kubernetes and finding ways to seamlessly bring them into the cloud (we're even multi-cloud now without them even noticing!) On the other hand, it's very challenging because when you work on a product, say Google Photos, as a SWE, you always have some direct tether to the product ("what should we build next? ahhhh, well I guess we could just embed stable difficusion and a million people would immediately play with it".) At Atomic, my tether is very ambiguous. If I do my job successfully, they'll be able to do research more quickly (? effectively?), and eventually we'll be able to produce a therapeutic that hopefully changes the world. Identifying what I can do today to speed up that far outcome in the future is very challenging, but it is a far more interesting challenge than gluing some pre-existing software into my UI or running A/B tests to turn a red button blue.
If, like me, you enjoy being given ownership over incredibly ambiguous problems, please do reach out!
This role focuses on directly partnering with the biologists: https://boards.greenhouse.io/atomai/jobs/4726839004
This role is expansive cloud infra: https://boards.greenhouse.io/atomai/jobs/4531035004
And this role is directly partnering with the ML scientists: https://boards.greenhouse.io/atomai/jobs/4191285004