Platform Engineering Lead | AI Infra

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $205K – $235K

Employment Type: FullTime

About Plasmidsaurus

Plasmidsaurus is on a mission to accelerate new cures and promote a healthier planet by unlocking a new level of productivity for scientists. Our sequencing services are used daily by thousands of innovators, including Nobel laureates, Fortune 100 pharma, and over 70,000 scientists.

We began by revolutionizing plasmid sequencing, making it exponentially cheaper and faster, with innovative sequencing technologies and a global network of laboratories that turn samples into answers in hours, not weeks.

Now we are expanding that same disruptive model across all of genomics. With the launch of our new RNA-seq service, we are taking a bold step toward our vision to sequence everything, providing scientists everywhere with faster, simpler, and more affordable access to the data that powers discovery.

Every team member at Plasmidsaurus plays a crucial role in driving the future of biotech research. Together, we are building the world’s most efficient sequencing engine that operates overnight, scales globally, and helps scientists make breakthroughs faster than ever before.

Position Overview

Technical lead + manager for the compute, data, AI, and security infrastructure that runs our sequencing operation.

You will:

• Own core services that orchestrate lab devices (robots, sequencers, on-prem Linux servers) and the data ingestion pipeline

• Build cloud infrastructure and data pipelines to house, process, and deliver terabytes of sequencing data

• Design infrastructure to orchestrate millions of bioinformatics tasks (queues, workflow orchestration, scheduling)

• Build AI infrastructure and internal tooling to enable agentic systems:

  • Quality Scientist Agents - monitor operations end-to-end, surface anomalies, and intervene/escalate when quality or reliability issues appear

  • Logistics Agents - coordinate drivers around the world to move packages to labs and carriers

  • Bioinformatics Coding Agents - long-running agents for adaptive analysis of diverse sample types with unknown/shifting data distributions

Culture

You are someone who:

• Enjoys high agency and high ownership work

• Can lead ambiguous, cross-functional projects from idea to production

• Is curious about learning from other people’s expertise in scientific/biological domains

• Is excited to make an impact on the scientific community

• Is a life-long learner

• Is excited to work in a tight-knit fast-paced environment with a motivated team

• Values clear communication, mentorship, and helping others learn new skills

• Excited about building on the bleeding edge

Qualifications

• BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Math, Physics or technical subject

• 7+ years of industry experience (or equivalent)

• Prior experience leading projects and mentoring engineers (people or technical leadership)

• Experience building LLM/agent systems (tooling, evaluation, safety/permissions, prompt + workflow design)

• Primarily developing with coding agents in all parts of software lifecycle - design, implementation, test, review

• Strong experience with REST API best practices (such as OpenAPI) and service-oriented architectures

• Strong experience with SQL and data modeling in relational databases (postgres)

• Strong experience with Python backend services (e.g., Flask/Django/FastAPI)

• Strong experience working in AWS for containerized task orchestration (Lambda, ECS, Batch, StepFunctions)

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools, like Terraform or AWS CDK

• Experience building distributed systems with task queues (such as Celery and SQS)

• Experience working with Linux servers (systemd services, basic networking, application deployment tools like ansible)

• Comfort operating production systems: incident response, debugging, performance, reliability

• Desire to learn about DNA sequencing bioinformatics algorithms and workflows

We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't perfectly align with the job description as we seek out diverse and creative perspectives. Team members who love to learn and collaborate in an inclusive environment will thrive with us. We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. If you need additional accommodations to feel comfortable during your interview process, please let us know at careers@plasmidsaurus.com.