Hey, sorry that it came across that way. The ops position is definitely not about looking for a superman to dump a buggy system on. Issues are root-caused and it's a point of culture that we don't see the same bug twice.
Another Transcriptic just Slacked everyone your comment here which has prompted a discussion about what we're really looking for in an "ops" person. The "exceptional coding skills" bullet is in almost all of our engineering job posting, and we thought such skills would apply to really good "devops" people, too; maybe this is wrong and asking for the wrong skill set. (The SREs I know at Google are all really good developers.)
Being an "on-call position" is a side effect of our volume and the fact that cells don't stop dividing at 8pm. Depending on when projects get started we often end up running reactions all the time, and so yes there is a (metaphorical) pager involved. Even minor failures here are very time sensitive due to the biological nature, and lost samples can be extremely costly (and devastating to our reputation with customers). I think this ops role is more about setting up the processes rather than being the only person (people) to respond to issues.
We'll be reflecting on that job description and update the posting.
