Senior Backend Engineer

Department: EPD

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

About Orchestra

Orchestra helps companies navigate the journey from discovery to medicine by connecting science, operations, and finance in an intelligent platform. We're on a mission to make every R&D dollar count.

Developing new medicines is a societal imperative to improve human health and reduce medical costs. Brilliant science needs effective management to develop breakthrough medicines that reach patients. We aim to bring the same level of sophistication to scientific development that modern tools brought to software development. While software teams can ship updates daily, R&D organizations face unique challenges: years long development cycles, complex interdependencies, and high-stakes decisions that can make or break billion dollar programs.

Founded by early Benchling leaders, we just emerged from stealth with $20M in funding from 8VC, Andreessen Horowitz, Insight Partners, Definition, and Haystack to transform how biotech companies operate. Our customers are working on society's most important challenges, including neurodegeneration, cancer, metabolic disease, and biomanufacturing. We're looking for engineers who are excited about building software that helps scientific organizations operate more effectively.

The Role

We're seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join our growing team in San Francisco. You'll work with our team to create complex but intuitive products to manage R&D.

Challenges You'll Tackle

Complex Decision Making: Build interactive tools that help organizations model different paths to market for their discoveries, assessing complex trade offs between time, money, and technical risk. Our users need to understand how decisions today affect their programs years into the future.

Organizational Alignment: Create intuitive interfaces that help diverse teams (scientists, program managers, executives) understand how their work connects to broader company goals. This includes designing clear ways to visualize complex dependencies and communicate progress across teams.

Scientific Operations: Design interfaces that scientists and researchers use daily to manage their studies, track progress, and coordinate with their teams. This requires crafting experiences that empower rather than get in the way of work.

AI Powered R&D Management: Leverage LLMs to help teams generate and evaluate scenarios, infer scientific progress and risks from unstructured data, and surface critical insights from across their R&D portfolio.

What Sets You Apart

Complexity: You understand how to build backends for complex, interconnected systems where changes in one area cascade across multiple dimensions. You're excited about creating infrastructure that handles the unique challenges of long term, high stakes R&D programs.

Agency: You're drawn to environments where you can shape both the technical architecture and product direction. You enjoy the responsibility of building foundational systems that will scale, balancing the speed needed at an early stage company with the craftsmanship required for complex, mission critical software.

Curiosity: You're genuinely curious about how breakthrough products are developed and excited about building software that helps scientific organizations operate more effectively. You want your technical work to contribute to bringing medicines and other innovations to market.

Qualifications

Required

• 6-8 years of backend development experience with production systems at scale

• Deep expertise in Typescript, NestJS, PostgreSQL

• Track record of building complex, scalable, reliable cloud-based software

• Experience with cloud platform (AWS/Azure/GCP) and containerization

• Strong experience in data modeling and API design

• Collaborative mindset with proven track record of working effectively in small, fast-moving engineering teams

Preferred

• AI/ML integration with OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar LLM providers

• Prompt engineering and RAG implementation experience

• Full-stack capabilities - can contribute to frontend when needed (React/TypeScript)

• Track record of mentoring other engineers