Lead Platform Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE Join the platform engineering team at a data infrastructure company building tools that turn fragmented laboratory data into a unified, queryable resource for scientists and AI systems. As the senior engineering anchor, you will shape the architecture, security, and scale of this foundational platform. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own the platform's architecture, execution, security posture, and scaling strategy. - Build and maintain production ingestion pipelines, APIs, microservices, and storage layers that normalize diverse scientific data while preserving provenance. - Manage knowledge graphs and vector search systems to support combined semantic and structured retrieval. - Develop high-concurrency services in Go and Python, including controlled agent write boundaries and isolated execution environments. - Design security controls for service authentication, tenant isolation, secrets management, encryption, and zero-trust access. - Own cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and observability, and establish service-level objectives and internal developer workflows. - Set engineering standards, review code, mentor teammates, and help grow the platform engineering team. - Partner with company leadership on team design, interviewing, and recruiting as the organization scales. 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 owning ingestion for messy, multi-source data, including schema harmonization and entity resolution. - Proficiency with Go and Python or FastAPI, plus experience with knowledge graphs or vector search technologies. - Experience designing production security boundaries and establishing engineering practices, observability, and service-level objectives. - Dedicated infrastructure engineering experience in addition to software engineering; biotech data systems, computational biology, and SOC 2 or similar compliance experience are a plus. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Base salary range: $220,000 to $300,000 annually. Equity is not specified. Visa sponsorship or transfer is not available. LOCATION On-site in San Francisco, California, five days per week. Relocation assistance is available.