Lead Platform Engineer

About the Role

Lead the platform engineering effort at an early-stage biotech data infrastructure company. You will own the architecture, security, and scale of a foundational platform that turns diverse laboratory data into a unified, queryable knowledge base for scientists and AI agents.

What You'll Do

• Set the architectural direction and build ingestion pipelines, APIs, microservices, and storage layers for heterogeneous scientific data, preserving data provenance.
• Operate knowledge graphs and vector search systems to support combined symbolic and semantic retrieval.
• Build high-concurrency services in Go and Python, including controlled agent write boundaries and isolated execution environments.
• Define security boundaries, including service authentication, tenant isolation, secrets management, encryption, and zero-trust practices.
• Own cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, SLOs, and internal developer workflows.
• Establish engineering standards, review code, mentor engineers, and help grow the platform team.
• Partner with company leadership on team design and platform engineering recruitment.

What We're Looking For

• At least 5 years of platform or infrastructure engineering experience, with a track record building and operating production backend infrastructure, data platforms, or distributed systems.
• Strong experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, and modern CI/CD systems.
• Experience designing ingestion for messy, multi-source data, including schema harmonization and entity resolution.
• Proficiency with Go and Python or FastAPI, plus production data systems such as knowledge graphs or vector search.
• Experience with production security, observability, and infrastructure engineering, in addition to software development.
• Leadership experience setting architecture, mentoring engineers, or establishing engineering rigor; biotech data experience and SOC 2 or similar compliance experience are beneficial.
• Must be authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship or transfer.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary

$220,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site, five days per week in San Francisco, California. Relocation assistance is available.