Lead Platform Engineer

Job Description:

• Technical lead for the compute, data, AI, and security infrastructure that runs our sequencing operation.
• You will own core services that orchestrate lab devices (robots, sequencers, on-prem Linux servers) and the data ingestion pipeline
• Build cloud infrastructure and data pipelines to house, process, and deliver terabytes of sequencing data
• Design infrastructure to orchestrate millions of bioinformatics tasks (queues, workflow orchestration, scheduling)
• Build AI infrastructure and internal tooling to enable agentic systems:
• Quality Scientist Agents - monitor operations end-to-end, surface anomalies, and intervene/escalate when quality or reliability issues appear
• Logistics Agents - coordinate drivers around the world to move packages to labs and carriers
• Bioinformatics Coding Agents - long-running agents for adaptive analysis of diverse sample types with unknown/shifting data distributions

This opportunity aligns with your focus on backend and infrastructure roles in San Francisco within the AI industry. You will be working with a top 1% hiring manager who maintains a streamlined three-step interview process, including a final call with the CEO.

Work experience

• 6+ years of experience in platform/backend/infrastructure engineering
• Must have impactful experience at a startup while it has scaled (ideally Seed - Series C)
• Can design + build reliable distributed systems (queues, orchestration, state machines) and ship them to production
• Led projects and mentored engineers on small teams
• Former successful founder or founding engineer

Education

• BS in CS, Engineering, Math, Physics or equivalent technical degree

Hard skills

• Strong AWS orchestration (ECS, Batch, StepFunctions) + Python backend work (FastAPI/Django)
• Linux server administration and distributed task queues (Celery/SQS)
• Experience building LLM/agent systems (tooling, evaluation, safety/permissions, prompt + workflow design)

Soft skills

• Very hungry and wanting to take a step up in their career. Senior/Staff - > Lead engineer

Miscellaneous

• Up to date with newest AI tooling
• Genuine curiosity about biotech/science domains

Traits to avoid

• Too hands off, doing IC work less than 70% of the time
• Working on ML infra or training pipelines