Senior Data Engineer, Formation Bio
$177.5-232k
+ Equity
1-3 days a week in office
End-to-end medical trial solutions
Be an early applicant
End-to-end medical trial solutions
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
$177.5-232k
+ Equity
1-3 days a week in office
101-200 employees
Company mission
To bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently.
Role
Who you are
- The ideal candidate is deeply fluent in Snowflake and dbt, has strong opinions about data modeling best practices, and has experience handling large and complex datasets across diverse ingestion patterns
- You thrive in environments where data quality and engineering rigor are treated as first-class concerns
- You have 5+ years of experience in data engineering, with a strong track record of building and maintaining production-grade pipelines
- You are deeply fluent in dbt and follow best practices rigorously—including modular model design, sources and refs, testing (schema + data), documentation, and environment management
- You have hands-on expertise with Snowflake, including schema design, performance tuning, and data governance patterns
- You have experience with at least one modern orchestration tool—we use Dagster, but experience with Airflow or Prefect is equally welcome
- You have broad ingestion experience across source types: REST APIs, flat files (CSV, JSON, Parquet), relational databases, and vendor-licensed datasets
- You have worked with large datasets (TB -> PB scale) and understand the engineering considerations that come with scale—partitioning, incremental loading, efficient data movement, and storage optimization
- You're a strong data modeler who thinks carefully about how data is structured, named, and layered for downstream usability
- You value documentation, testability, and building things others can maintain and extend
- You can balance upfront design with speed to execution, slowing down when it counts without getting stuck in the details
- Bonus: You have experience with data quality and observability tooling such as Elementary, Great Expectations, or similar frameworks — and you treat data quality as a first-class engineering concern, not an afterthought
- Bonus: You have experience with Spark, Databricks for large-scale data processing workloads
- Bonus: You have experience with large-scale data transfer tooling such as AWS DataSync, AWS S3 Transfer Acceleration, or equivalent cloud-native data movement services
- Bonus: You have experience in healthcare or life sciences data environments, including familiarity with EHR, claims, or other biomedical datasets
What the job involves
- We're looking for a Data Engineer to join the Scientific Data Intelligence (SDI) team at Formation Bio to help build and scale the data infrastructure that powers our drug development platform
- In this role, your primary focus will be supporting the Data Science team — building the coherent, well-structured data models, feature engineering pipelines, and evidence layers that underpin their scientific work
- You'll also be responsible for ingesting data from a wide variety of sources—APIs, files, databases, and licensed third-party datasets—and transforming it into clean, analytics-ready assets using modern data tooling
- This is a foundational engineering role for someone who takes pride in building things right: reliable pipelines, well-structured data models, and systems that others can trust and build on
- You'll work closely with Data Scientists and other engineers across the SDI team to ensure that high-quality data is consistently available where and when it's needed — and structured in a way that directly accelerates scientific discovery
- Partner closely with Data Scientists and other teams to build coherent data models, feature engineering pipelines, and structured evidence layers that directly support scientific analysis and machine learning workflows
- Design and build scalable ingestion pipelines to onboard data from diverse sources including REST APIs, flat files, relational databases, and licensed third-party datasets
- Develop and maintain robust data models in dbt, adhering to best practices around modularity, testing, documentation, and layered architecture (staging, intermediate, mart)
- Orchestrate pipelines using Dagster to ensure reliable, observable, and maintainable workflows
- Implement data quality checks, validation frameworks, and monitoring to ensure trustworthiness of datasets across the platform
- Collaborate with Data Scientists and analysts to understand data needs and translate them into well-structured, reusable models
- Handle large-scale data movement and transfer scenarios, applying appropriate tooling and patterns to ensure efficiency and reliability at scale
- Document data models, pipeline logic, and transformation assumptions to support discoverability and data governance
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. This success has pushed Formation to expand beyond supporting trials into developing assets itself. In 2025, it reached a major milestone by licensing its first drug - a late-stage JAK/SYK inhibitor - to Sanofi in a deal worth up to hundreds of millions. Alongside this, the company has also added an early immunology program to its pipeline, signaling a broader push into in-house development.
Now a Unicorn, with partners including Pfizer, Sanofi, Novartis and 23andMe, Formation Bio is steadily embedding itself within the Big Pharma ecosystem. How far it can go remains an open question, but the prospect of cheaper drugs and faster innovation is becoming harder for the industry to ignore.
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 benefits
- Flexible Time Off: We have a flexible PTO policy as we trust our team members to take the time they need to recharge.
- Parental Leave: We believe your personal life enriches your professional one. We offer 16 weeks of paid parental leave for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents so you can start or grow your family.
- Comprehensive Benefits: All full time employees have access to health, vision, and dental insurance. Additionally, we provide pre-tax commuter benefits, access to a 401k plan, short and long-term disability and life insurance.
- Education & Career Development Resources: Formation Bio offers a plethora of professional development resources to employees. Some examples include fireside chats with industry experts, conference passes, certification courses, internal mobility opportunities, in depth manager training, leadership coaching program, and more.
- Strategic Hiring Hubs: Formation Bio teams are hybrid and based in four key hubs: New York City, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, and North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Our bright and collaborative NYC headquarters is conveniently located near major transit hubs and stocked with drinks, coffee, snacks, and a weekly lunch.
- Community: Our teams collaborate closely to achieve our mission, supporting each other across functions and priorities. We build connection through team-building events, quarterly company gatherings, a company-wide retreat every two years, and Employee Resource Groups.
Company HQ
Midtown South, New York, NY
Leadership
Benjamine Liu
(Co-Founder & 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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