Senior Staff Data Engineer
Biohub is the first large-scale initiative bringing frontier AI models, massive compute, and frontier experimental capabilities under one roof. We're building a general-purpose system to accelerate scientific discovery, integrating frontier AI models, biological foundation models, and lab capabilities, with the ultimate goal of curing disease. Our technology powers scientists around the world, translating AI capabilities into tools that accelerate research everywhere.
The Team
Biohub is a 501(c)(3) biomedical research organization building the first large-scale scientific initiative combining frontier AI with frontier biology to solve disease. We build the technology to help scientists around the world use AI-powered biology to study how cells operate, organize, and work as part of systems to understand why disease happens and how to correct it. With our compute capacity, AI research and engineering, and state-of-the-art technology for measuring, imaging, and programming biology, we are enabling scientists worldwide to use AI-powered biology to advance our understanding of human health.
The Opportunity
The role is part of the Data Engineering team, which focuses on owning the strategy, sourcing and implementation for data supporting AI research and development. Our goal is to maximize the speed, agility, and capability of biological AI research by connecting public data resources and Biohub's experimental platforms to AI systems. The data that trains biological frontier models comes in dozens of modalities (sequences, images, spatial coordinates, time series, molecular structures, metadata, publication artifacts) each with its own noise characteristics, biases, and information content. The question of how to represent this data for learning is one of the most important open problems in biological AI.
As a Senior Staff Data Engineer at Biohub, you'll be designing systems that ingest data from public repositories, transform heterogeneous biological formats into AI-ready datasets, combine that with proprietary datasets, and deliver training datasets to researchers pushing the boundaries of what's possible in biological AI. The infrastructure you build will directly shape what our models can learn.
We're a small team with significant resources and long time horizons. We use AI tools aggressively in our own work-Claude Code, agents for workflow automation, LLMs for metadata extraction. We care about code quality, operational reliability, and building systems that scale. And we care about the biology: we want engineers who can recognize when a pipeline output is technically correct but scientifically wrong.
If you want to work at the intersection of large-scale infrastructure and frontier science, with real autonomy and the chance to build something genuinely new, we'd like to talk.
What You'll Do
- Design and build data pipelines that process genomic and imaging data at petabyte scale
- Solve performance and bandwidth challenges with creative engineering
- Build agent-based systems for automated dataset curation, quality control, and workflow generation
- Create tooling for data cataloging and registration that makes datasets discoverable and accessible
- Collaborate with AI Research teams to translate model requirements into data specifications, and with our scientists to integrate public and internal data into large-scale ai-ready datasets
- Improve pipeline reliability and observability, working toward 99%+ success rates without manual intervention
What You'll Bring
- 8+ years of experience building reliable, operable data systems at petabyte scale for Staff-level candidates; 12+ years for Senior Staff-level candidates.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals
- Experience deploying distributed computing frameworks like Databricks, Spark, or Ray for large-scale data processing
- Experience building and deploying large scale data platform solutions using infrastructure as code like Terraform or CDK
- Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) and on prem infrastructure
- Comfort with ambiguity; ability to make progress when requirements are evolving
- Interest in AI-native development practices and tooling
- Nice to have: Background in computational biology, bioinformatics, or life sciences and experience with genomics datasets and formats (FASTQ, BAM, VCF) or imaging formats (OME-Zarr, HDF5)
Compensation
The anticipated base pay ranges for this role in Redwood City, CA and New York City, NY are $241,000-$301,000 annually for the Staff level and $270,000-$338,000 annually for the Senior Staff level. Final compensation and placement within the applicable range are based on the level at which you are hired, as well as job-related skills, experience, and knowledge evaluated throughout the interview process.
Better Together
As we grow, we’re excited to strengthen in-person connections and cultivate a collaborative, team-oriented environment. This role is a hybrid position requiring you to be onsite for at least 60% of the working month, approximately 3 days a week, with specific in-office days determined by the team’s manager. The exact schedule will be at the hiring manager's discretion and communicated during the interview process.
Benefits for the Whole You
We’re thankful to have an incredible team behind our work. To honor their commitment, we offer a wide range of benefits to support the people who make all we do possible.
- Provides a generous employer match on employee 401(k) contributions to support planning for the future.
- Paid time off to volunteer at an organization of your choice.
- Funding for select family-forming benefits.
- Relocation support for employees who need assistance moving
If you’re interested in a role but your previous experience doesn’t perfectly align with each qualification in the job description, we still encourage you to apply as you may be the perfect fit for this or another role.
#LI-Hybrid #LI-Onsite