Lead Platform Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 21, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 19, 2026.
About the Role
Join the platform engineering team at a data infrastructure company serving scientific and analytics workloads. You will lead the design and development of a foundational platform that turns diverse laboratory data into a structured, queryable knowledge base for scientists and AI systems.
What You'll Do
Set the architectural direction, delivery plan, security posture, and scaling strategy for the core data and execution platform.
Build and operate ingestion pipelines, APIs, microservices, and storage layers that structure varied scientific data while preserving provenance.
Manage knowledge graphs and vector search systems to support hybrid retrieval for agent-based workloads.
Develop high-concurrency services in Go and Python, including controlled agent write boundaries and isolated execution environments.
Design service authentication, tenant isolation, secrets management, encryption, and other zero-trust security controls.
Own cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and observability, and establish SLOs and reusable developer workflows.
Set engineering standards through architecture guidance, code reviews, mentoring, and team development.
Partner with company leadership on engineering team design, recruiting, and hiring as the organization grows.
What We're Looking For
Three to seven years of platform or infrastructure engineering experience, with a track record building production backend infrastructure, data platforms, or distributed systems.
Dedicated infrastructure engineering experience alongside software engineering expertise.
Strong hands-on skills with Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, and modern CI/CD systems.
Experience designing ETL or ELT pipelines for complex, unstructured enterprise or scientific data.
Proficiency in Go, Python, FastAPI, TypeDB, TypeQL, Qdrant, GitHub Actions, OpenTelemetry, and Prometheus.
Experience professionalizing early-stage infrastructure and establishing sound engineering practices; computational biology, biotech data systems, or SOC 2 experience is a plus.
Authorization to work in the United States without visa sponsorship or transfer.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary is $220,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, California, five days per week. Relocation assistance is available.