Lead Platform Engineer
- South San Francisco, CA, United States
$205,000 to $235,000 USD / year
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Job details
- Pay
- $205,000 to $235,000 USD / year
- Experience
- At least 5 years of platform, backend, or infrastructure engineering experience, including impactful work at a startup during a period of growth.
- Posting language
- English
- Posted
Original job description
ABOUT THE ROLE
Lead the compute, data, AI, and security infrastructure behind a biotechnology sequencing operation. This hands-on technical leadership role combines platform engineering with close collaboration across engineering and scientific teams to support reliable lab operations and large-scale data processing.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Own services that orchestrate lab devices, including robotics, sequencers, and on-premises Linux servers, along with the data ingestion pipeline.
- Build cloud infrastructure and data pipelines to store, process, and deliver terabytes of sequencing data.
- Design queues, workflow orchestration, and scheduling systems to coordinate millions of bioinformatics tasks.
- Develop AI infrastructure and internal tools for operational quality monitoring, logistics coordination, and adaptive bioinformatics analysis.
- Lead cross-functional projects from problem definition through production, connecting architecture choices to business impact.
- Contribute directly to engineering work while mentoring teammates and communicating clearly across disciplines.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- At least 5 years of platform, backend, or infrastructure engineering experience, including impactful work at a startup during a period of growth.
- Strong AWS orchestration experience, especially ECS, Batch, and Step Functions, plus Python backend development with FastAPI or Django.
- Production experience designing reliable distributed systems, including queues, orchestration, and state machines.
- Experience with Linux server administration and distributed task queues such as Celery or SQS.
- Ability to lead projects and mentor engineers on a small team, with substantial hands-on individual-contributor work.
- Experience building LLM or agent systems, including tooling, evaluation, safety and permissions, and prompt and workflow design; familiarity with current AI tools.
- A technical degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, or physics, or equivalent background, and curiosity about biotech and scientific work.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
Base salary: $205,000 to $235,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is available.
LOCATION
Hybrid role based in South San Francisco, California.