Lead Platform Engineer

Lead Platform Engineer | First platform hire, greenfield architecture and 1–2% equity before an $8–10M raise | San Francisco (Onsite) | $220K–$300K base We've partnered with a seed-stage startup building the data and reasoning infrastructure to change how biological research gets done. Founded by two Yale cancer scientists, they're taking on a $28B problem: researchers lose 40 to 60 percent of their time wrangling scattered, messy lab data instead of doing actual science. Their platform turns that heterogeneous lab data into a unified, queryable knowledge base that both scientists and AI agents can use, making biological data machine-legible for frontier ML for the first time. They're already in contract discussions with some of the world's most prestigious research institutions, including the Broad Institute and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, are backed by Long Journey Ventures and Caffeinated Capital, and have an $8 to $10M round planned for October. A leading information-retrieval professor is a hands-on scientific advisor, actively reviewing the architecture and code. This is a rare chance to be the first platform hire and own the architecture outright. You won't inherit anyone's system. You'll design the foundational data and execution layer from scratch, the APIs, orchestration, storage, security boundaries and reliability, on a modern stack with zero legacy debt. You'll set the engineering standards and golden paths, then help hire and lead the platform team as the company scales. Joining before the raise means your 1 to 2 percent equity is granted at today's lower valuation. If you want maximum ownership, and you want your architectural decisions to become the blueprint for everything that follows, this is the seat. The Role As Lead Platform Engineer, you will: Own the architectural vision, execution, security posture and scaling of the core platform that turns scattered lab data into a unified, queryable knowledge base for scientists and AI agents. Design and build production ingestion pipelines, APIs, microservices and storage that normalise heterogeneous scientific inputs into a structured knowledge graph while preserving strict provenance. Manage production knowledge graphs (TypeDB and TypeQL) and vector search (Qdrant) for hybrid symbolic and semantic retrieval over agentic workloads. Architect high-concurrency services in Go alongside Python APIs, with controlled agent write boundaries and isolated execution environments. Design security in from first principles (service-to-service auth, tenant isolation, secrets, encryption, zero-trust) and own the cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability and SLOs on Kubernetes, Terraform and Ansible. Set the technical bar, establish the patterns and golden paths, and help build and lead the platform engineering team over time. About You You have 5+ years, or 3+ if exceptional, building and operating production backend infrastructure, data platforms or distributed systems, and you're ready to be the senior engineering anchor. You have deep proficiency with Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible and modern CI/CD. You have designed ETL/ELT pipelines for complex, unstructured enterprise or scientific data. You have professionalised early-stage infrastructure and instilled engineering rigour, comfortable owning architecture, system design, security posture and scaling end to end. You want to be very hands-on in a seed-stage environment with real ownership, and you can mentor engineers as the team grows. Nice to have: a background in computational biology or biotech data systems, experience guiding systems through SOC 2 or similar compliance, or time at a strong infrastructure team such as AWS, Stripe, Snowflake or Ramp. This role is 100% in-person in San Francisco (Jackson Square), five days a week, with up to $15K relocation support. You must already be authorised to work in the US, as the company cannot sponsor or transfer visas. The package is a $220K–$300K base plus 1 to 2 percent equity (a minimum of 1 percent even at the top of the range), with unusually strong benefits for this stage: fully covered health, dental and vision for you and dependents, 12 weeks paid parental leave, unlimited PTO, daily on-site meals and a learning budget. The team is moving quickly. If you want to architect the greenfield platform that lets AI reason over biology, apply now or send your CV directly to will@inventurerecruitment.com.