Full Stack Engineer

Location: Palo Alto, CA

Department: Technology Centers

About Arc Institute

The Arc Institute is a new scientific institution that conducts curiosity-driven basic science and technology development to understand and treat complex human diseases. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Arc is an independent research organization founded on the belief that many important research programs will be enabled by new institutional models. Arc operates in partnership with Stanford University, UCSF, and UC Berkeley.

While the prevailing university research model has yielded many tremendous successes, we believe in the importance of institutional experimentation as a way to make progress. These include:

• Funding: Arc will fully fund Core Investigator’s (PI’s) research groups, liberating scientists from the typical constraints of project-based external grants.
• Technology: Biomedical research has become increasingly dependent on complex tooling. Arc Technology Centers develop, optimize and deploy rapidly advancing experimental and computational technologies in collaboration with Core Investigators. 
• Support: Arc aims to provide first-class support—operationally, financially and scientifically—that will enable scientists to pursue long-term high risk, high reward research that can meaningfully advance progress in disease cures, including neurodegeneration, cancer, and immune dysfunction.
• Culture: We believe that culture matters enormously in science and that excellence is difficult to sustain. We aim to create a culture that is focused on scientific curiosity, a deep commitment to truth, broad ambition, and selfless collaboration.

Arc has scaled to over 350 people to date. With $650M+ in committed funding and a state of the art new lab facility in Palo Alto, Arc will continue to grow quickly in the coming years.

About the position

We're looking for a Full Stack Engineer with a backend and internal tools focus to help build the software infrastructure that powers science at Arc. You'll own and develop platforms that Arc's researchers rely on daily, from genomics submission systems to data catalogs to ML tooling, while contributing to public-facing products like the Virtual Cell Challenge. This is a hands-on, cross-functional role where you'll work directly with biologists, bioinformaticians, and ML engineers to understand their workflows and build tools that become essential to how researchers work.

About you

• You thrive at the intersection of engineering and domain expertise, building tools that make complex scientific workflows feel simple.
• You have a sharp eye for inefficiency and don't wait to be told what to build. You proactively seek out friction in workflows, talk to users, and propose solutions.
• You’re comfortable collaborating across disciplines, working with researchers, designers, and other stakeholders to clarify needs, define scope, and build intuitive, elegant tools.
• You’re a strong communicator and a self-directed builder who enjoys taking ownership, iterating quickly, and learning on the fly.
• You care about clarity and craft, writing clean code and building interfaces that balance usability, performance, and simplicity, without over-engineering.

In this position you will

• Own and evolve the Virtual Cell Challenge backend, including authentication, metrics pipelines, and participant analytics
• Build and maintain Arc's internal Genomics platforms, including NGS submission, sample tracking, and QC automation
• Architect and develop an internal Data Catalog for browsing, searching, and interacting with rich datasets across the Virtual Cell Atlas and other research programs
• Build tooling and infrastructure to support Arc's ML engineering workflows such as model registries, experiment tracking, and inference pipelines
• Own backend services for Arc's Imaging platform, supporting microscopy and spatial data workflows
• Collaborate directly with scientists and computational researchers to identify pain points and ship solutions with a product mindset

Requirements

• 4+ years of experience in backend or full-stack engineering roles, with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Biology, Bioinformatics, or a related field
• Proficiency in Python or Node.js and modern API frameworks such as FastAPI, Flask, or Express
• Strong experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred), including schema design, query optimization, and data modeling
• Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools (Claude, Cursor, Copilot, or similar) as a core part of your workflow
• Experience building internal apps and tools for scientific/technical users

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with scientific data formats and tools (e.g., h5ad/AnnData, pandas, NumPy, scverse ecosystem)
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure)
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Docker, and containerized deployments
• Familiarity with modern JavaScript/TypeScript and frameworks such as Next.js and React

The base salary range for this position is $133,000 to $165,000. These amounts reflect the range of base salary that the Institute reasonably would expect to pay a new hire or internal candidate for this position. The actual base compensation paid to any individual for this position may vary depending on factors such as experience, market conditions, education/training, skill level, and whether the compensation is internally equitable, and does not include bonuses, commissions, differential pay, other forms of compensation, or benefits. This position is also eligible to receive an annual discretionary bonus, with the amount dependent on individual and institute performance factors.