- Location
- Cambridge, New York, MA, New York
- Type
- Full-time
- Department
- Engineering
- Seniority
- Manager
- Education
- PhD
- Source
- RecruiterFlow
Description
What You'll Do:
Engineering Leadership & Team Building
-
Build, manage, and grow the engineering team. Hiring, mentoring, and setting a high bar for craft as the team scales.
-
Establish engineering processes (planning, code review, on-call, incident response) that fit a fast-moving startup without slowing it down.
-
Act as a career and technical mentor for engineers on the team and create clear paths for growth.
-
Represent engineering in company-wide planning alongside the Head of AI and Head of Product, translating business priorities into a coherent technical roadmap.
Technical Direction & Architecture
-
Own the architecture of the core web platform that enables deal teams to explore, upload, and analyze drug assets from discovery through due diligence and valuation.
-
Set direction on front-end architecture and backend/orchestration services that coordinate our service end to end.
-
Stay hands-on where it matters most. Reviewing designs and code, unblocking hard technical problems, and occasionally shipping directly, especially in ambiguous or high-stakes areas of the platform.
-
Design and maintain clean, scalable APIs between the core LLM orchestration layer and the platform, working closely with the Head of AI's team to expose model outputs as trustworthy, user-ready insights.
Reliability, Security & Scale
-
Own the reliability, security, and scalability of our production systems on AWS (or equivalent), including uptime, latency, and secure handling of sensitive scientific and deal data.
-
Champion engineering best practices across the team. Automated testing, CI/CD, observability, and modular architecture. Make the tradeoffs between speed and rigor explicit as we scale.
-
Build the foundation for compliance and security practices appropriate to handling sensitive life sciences and deal data.
Cross-Functional Partnership
-
Partner with the Head of Product to turn scientific and business logic into actionable workflows, and with the Head of AI to ensure ML systems and the product platform evolve together.
-
Work directly with customers and domain experts when needed to understand what "transformative outcome" looks like for a deal team and translate that into engineering priorities.
-
Report to the CTO on engineering roadmap, team health, and technical risk, and help shape overall technology strategy as a member of the leadership team.
-
8+ years of full-stack software engineering experience, including experience building modern web applications end-to-end. AWS experience is a necessity.
-
3+ years leading or managing engineering teams, ideally at a startup or high-growth environment, with a track record of hiring and developing engineers.
-
Experience owning architecture for complex, data-driven applications that integrate with APIs, asynchronous job systems, or machine learning backends.
-
Strong command of frontend architecture, state management, and visualization frameworks (e.g., React Query, Redux, D3, Plotly) as well as backend/API engineering (RESTful or GraphQL APIs, authentication/authorization, event-driven workflows, background jobs).
-
Familiarity with best practices for secure data handling, authentication, authorization (PBAC, RBAC) and compliance.
-
Education: Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
Soft Skills
-
A bias to action and delivery. Self-starter attitude with a strong sense of ownership over outcomes, not just code.
-
A leadership style that balances high standards with empathy. You build teams people want to stay on.
-
Strong problem-solving skills and an analytical mindset, with the judgment to know when to go deep technically versus when to delegate.
-
Excellent communication skills. Able to explain technical tradeoffs clearly to the CTO, peers in Product and AI, and non-technical stakeholders alike.
-
A collaborative operator who builds trust across functions and wants to build things that truly matter.
Bonus
-
Experience in healthcare, life sciences, or biopharma sectors is a plus, but not required. More important is a willingness to dive into the field and genuine curiosity about life sciences, the drug development process, and how dealmaking revolves around it.
-
Prior experience as a founding or early engineering leader at a startup scaling from seed/Series A through growth stage.
