Senior Data Engineer, Formation Bio
$220-280k
+ Equity
End-to-end medical trial solutions
Be an early applicant
End-to-end medical trial solutions
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
$220-280k
+ Equity
101-200 employees
Company mission
To bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently.
Role
Who you are
- This role is ideal for someone passionate about building scalable infrastructure at the intersection of data engineering and applied AI
- You have 7+ years of experience in data engineering, data platform, or applied AI roles, and you’ve led cross-functional technical projects that delivered real impact
- You’ve built production-grade pipelines that extract structured data from unstructured sources using LLMs, NER, and other NLP techniques—and you’re fluent in evaluating output quality
- You’re deeply comfortable with Python, SQL, dbt, and orchestration tools like Dagster or Airflow, and you treat observability and maintainability as non-negotiable
- You have hands-on experience with vector and/or graph databases, and you’ve integrated them into intelligent retrieval or enrichment workflows
- You bring strong architectural instincts and care deeply about building platforms that are extensible, observable, governed, and secure
- You’ve worked with cloud data platforms like Snowflake, and are familiar with cost optimization, RBAC, and infrastructure governance
- You’re excited by the chance to mentor others, set high technical standards, and help an organization use data and AI to make better decisions, faster
- Bonus points if you’ve worked with biomedical, clinical, or scientific datasets, or have experience enabling agentic AI systems and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines
What the job involves
- Formation Bio is seeking a hands-on technical leader to shape the future of our Data Platform
- You’ll lead efforts to ingest and transform unstructured and structured research, biomedical and clinical data into high-quality, actionable assets that power discovery and decision-making across the company
- Your work will directly impact our most ambitious AI and data strategy initiatives
- This is a high-impact role for a builder who thrives on technical depth, mentorship, and platform thinking
- You’ll lead the design of scalable systems that transform both structured and unstructured data into trusted, usable assets—enabling everything from analytics to AI-powered applications
- Whether you're helping the organization make sense of complex documents like clinical protocols and drug labels or building robust data pipelines that power operational and scientific decision-making, your work will sit at the core of how Formation Bio turns data into impact
- Set and communicate technical direction across our Data Platform
- Mentor engineers in platform development, LLM workflows, and best practices for observability, quality, and governance
- Guide planning and execution of roadmap priorities in alignment with AI and data strategy initiatives
- Design and operationalize pipelines for classification, entity extraction, summarization, and document parsing using LLMs and NER
- Structure extracted outputs into well-defined schemas for downstream modeling, APIs, and semantic search
- Integrate vector and graph databases to power retrieval, enrichment, and relationship modeling
- Lead architectural decisions across the data platform to support modularity, scalability, and cost-efficiency
- Lead efforts to set standards on orchestration, compute strategy, access control, and CI/CD pipelines
- Establish standards for data governance, observability, and metadata management
- Lead development of ingestion pipelines for structured and unstructured data using Python, Dagster, and Rivery
- Integrate AI-derived outputs into analytics-ready data models using SQL and dbt
- Partner with cross-functional teams to ensure data assets are clean, documented, and actionable
Our take
Clinical drug trials are lengthy and expensive, delaying the supply of vital new drugs to patients and costing lives. For Formation Bio, this is an efficiency issue - one which it hopes to solve with its end-to-end automation solution.
According to the company, its approach has teams running medical trials twice as fast and at half the cost. It's worked so well, in fact, that Formation Bio is looking to take drug development in-house.
Now a Unicorn, the company has secured heavyweights like Pfizer, Sanofi, Novartis and 23andMe as partners. Precisely how it will fare in the Big Pharma ecosystem remains to be seen, but the promise of cheaper drugs and faster innovation is certainly causing a stir in a market that has historically been resistant to both.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
30% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Jun 2024
$372m
SERIES D
Sep 2021
$156m
SERIES C
Total funding: $530.3m
Company HQ
Midtown South, New York, NY
Leadership
Benjamine Liu
(CEO)Worked as a computational biologist at various Neurology departments, following a D.Phil in computational Biology and Psychiatry at Oxford. They are also an Advisor at Harvard Business School.
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