Lead Platform Engineer

Role details

ABOUT THE ROLE Join the platform engineering team at a scientific data infrastructure company. You will lead the architecture and development of a foundational data platform that brings complex laboratory data into a unified, queryable system for scientific and AI-driven applications. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own the platform's architecture, implementation, security posture, and ability to scale. - Build and operate data ingestion pipelines, APIs, microservices, and storage layers that structure varied scientific inputs while preserving data provenance. - Manage knowledge graph and vector search systems to support combined symbolic and semantic retrieval. - Develop high-concurrency services in Go and Python, including controlled agent write boundaries and isolated execution environments. - Design service authentication, tenant isolation, secrets management, encryption, and other security controls. - Manage cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and observability, and establish service objectives and internal engineering standards. - Set architectural patterns, review code, mentor engineers, and help grow the platform engineering team. - Partner with company leadership on engineering team design and recruiting as the organization scales. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Three to seven years of platform or infrastructure engineering experience, including production backend infrastructure, data platforms, or distributed systems. - Strong experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, and modern CI/CD systems. - Experience designing ETL or ELT pipelines for complex, unstructured enterprise or scientific data. - Proficiency with Go, Python, FastAPI, knowledge graph technologies, vector search, GitHub Actions, OpenTelemetry, and Prometheus. - Dedicated infrastructure engineering experience, rather than a software engineering background alone. - Scientific data or computational biology experience is a plus; familiarity with SOC 2 or similar compliance frameworks is also beneficial. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Base salary is $220,000 to $300,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship or transfer is not available. LOCATION On-site in San Francisco, California, five days per week.