Lab Ops 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 cosme