Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer. Ginkgo is constructing, editing, and redesigning the living world in order to answer the globe’s growing challenges in health, energy, food, materials, and more. Our bioengineers make use of an in-house automated foundry for designing and building new organisms.
As Ginkgo enters a phase where demand for our services have never been higher, we are building a new Operations function with the mandate to drive “scale” across the organization. Specifically, economies of scale at Ginkgo can be observed empirically from a relationship they refer to as “Knight’s Law” (loosely inspired by Moore’s Law for semiconductors). Since 2015, Ginkgo has witnessed an exponential increase in output (3x biological tests per year) alongside an exponential decline (50% reduction) in the average cost per test. To help continue this impressive trend, Ginkgo is building a Continuous Improvement & Industrial Engineering (CI/IE) team within the Operations function. This team will design and implement new tools, methods, and operating models necessary to further unlock the scale growth needed to achieve our long-term financial, operational, and commercial goals.
Reporting to Ginkgo’s Vice President, CI/IE, the Director, CI/IE, in coordination with subject matter experts across the organization, will identify, analyze, prioritize, and define/develop new ways of working that reduce complexity, improve predictability, and increase productivity of Foundry and non-Foundry activities. You will serve as a key change agent and strategic thinker that supports, promotes, and embeds new ways of working across the organization and practice good change management practices. You will have the experience & judgment to know when to apply new-to-the-world solutions versus practices perfected by other industries (Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen, etc.). The Director, CI/IE will identify, develop, plan, and lead key strategic continuous improvement events and help drive execution of deliverables to improve efficiency, quality, and cost in alignment with corporate goals. Leading by example and through coaching/training the Dir, CI/IE will help drive an operational excellence mindset throughout Ginkgo by building the internal capabilities of the organization utilizing lean tools while also embedding a culture of Continuous Improvement.
In addition to the above, this role will specifically be focused on identifying, developing, and executing strategic cross-functional projects targeted at developing an Operational Excellence (OPEX) culture and to provide technical support and coaching across business units. As a strategic position, this role will be critical in establishing the OPEX Standards for Ginkgo and help audit against proficiency/adherence to those systems as directed by Site and OPEX leadership.