Lead Platform Engineer

Role details

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.