Recent advances in the fields of molecular biology and machine learning offer new opportunities for engineering novel proteins. Riding the wave of these breakthroughs, we are building an autonomous drug discovery platform that combines synthetic biology, machine learning, and robotic automation. While we believe that this represents the future of drug discovery, we faced many challenges while building this multidisciplinary system. In this talk, I will give an overview of our tech and reflect on the journey we have had so far.