Given how inhospitable life is to organisms like ours, it seems almost guaranteed that any space faring entity must be what we call "artificial". (Whether that be silicon computers or something else.)

And at that point, probably some sort of hive mind or "super intelligence" as well. (Since having billions of independent actors is very inefficient -- so much redundancy and annoying coordination problems to deal with).

It/they would probably have mastery of biotechnology and could print whatever life forms they want at the last mile if needed. Maybe purely for the entertainment purposes of embodying some highly constrained consciousness. Or for interfacing with new species encountered. Or just for downloading the stored consciousness of their pets from the home world so they can run around again.

It's a pretty minor detail as to whether the biological life forms that created the thing still exist happily on their home planet, or uploaded their consciousness into it, or were exterminated by it or themselves or some unavoidable natural disaster... Biology just doesn't have scaling power.