Principal Data Engineer

Description

A rapidly growing company is looking for a principal data engineer to help scale the programmable infrastructure behind a new platform for studying human cellular biology, with the aim of bringing new medicines to patients.

The company was founded in 2019 by a life sciences venture builder. It is developing a platform to create treatments for common diseases, combining large-scale human genetics, genomics, stem cell studies, high-dimensional cell phenotyping and artificial intelligence to find the underlying causes of disease and the best points to intervene.

This is a senior, hands-on leadership role with wide technical authority. You will act as architectural lead for data engineering, setting direction for the AWS environment and the pipelines, catalog and access layers built on it, and writing the technical roadmap and standards that others follow.

The work covers core cloud data engineering, such as orchestration, warehousing, infrastructure as code and cost control, along with the specific demands of scientific data. That includes tracing each microscopy image to its cell line, donor and source study, and letting scientists query genotype questions on their own.

The team supports a research organization whose data output and analysis needs are growing quickly. The existing platform works well and is now moving into a planned modernization, and you will lead that change with strong influence over its next-generation design.

Responsibilities

• Own the AWS environment as technical owner and architect, covering account structure, IAM, networking, compute and storage.
• Lead and expand cost governance: budgets, alerts, enforced tagging, rightsizing, and storage lifecycle and tiering.
• Define and run developer operations for the data platform, including infrastructure as code, CI/CD, container builds, and secrets and environment management.
• Modernize the data lake, managed orchestration, metadata and ingestion workflows so they can handle future data volumes, and improve how data moves from the lab to the cloud.
• Work with ML and computational biology leaders to define how the platform connects to modelling work.

Requirements

• More than 10 years building and running production data infrastructure, including designing and owning platforms from start to finish.
• Deep AWS experience with S3, IAM, EC2, Batch, Lambda and Spark (EMR or an equivalent). You have owned production cloud environments, including multi-account setups and cross-account access.
• Strong Python and SQL, with experience building production-grade pipelines.
• Hands-on experience with workflow orchestration tools such as Nextflow, Airflow, Temporal, Step Functions, Redun or similar, and the judgement to choose between them.
• Solid skills in infrastructure as code (CloudFormation or CDK), CI/CD, containers and observability. DevOps is central to this role.
• Data modelling and warehouse or lakehouse design, including metadata management, lineage and data quality practices.
• Experience controlling cost at scale, including budgets, tagging, rightsizing and storage lifecycle across hundreds of terabytes.
• Understanding of scientific data concepts such as studies, samples, donors, cell lines and assays, and the ability to work directly with scientists to turn their questions into data models.
• Preferred: Familiarity with genetics and genomics data.
• Preferred: Experience with microscopy or high-content screening data, including large binary object stores, transfer optimization and image streaming for model training.
• Preferred: Production experience with Databricks, OpenMetadata or a comparable catalog.
• Preferred: Experience with Snowflake, especially governed access over cloud object storage.
• Preferred: ML infrastructure experience with SageMaker or Databricks ML, MLflow or Weights & Biases, or feature stores.
• Preferred: Experience serving data to LLM or agent clients, such as MCP servers or tool APIs.
• Preferred: Experience leading data platform architecture as a senior or principal individual contributor, ideally in biotech, pharma R&D or a research institute.

Conditions

Base salary range is $179,000 to $236,000, depending on qualifications, skills, competencies and experience.

If you meet some but not all of the listed qualifications, you are still encouraged to apply. The company is committed to building diverse and inclusive teams.

Benefits

• Healthcare coverage.
• Annual incentive program.
• Retirement benefits.
• A broad range of other benefits, with details based on the company's good faith estimate at publication, which may change over time.