Engineering Manager, Formation Bio
Infrastructure
$185.5-232k
+ Equity
3-5 days a week in office
Powering hyper-efficient, tech-driven drug development
Posted today
Powering hyper-efficient, tech-driven drug development
101-200 employees
Posted today
$185.5-232k
+ Equity
3-5 days a week in office
101-200 employees
Company mission
To bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently.
Role
Who you are
- 7+ years of total experience across hands-on infrastructure/SRE work and people management, including 3+ years directly managing Site Reliability, Infrastructure, or DevOps engineers
- A track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers, with the ability to give direct, actionable feedback and set clear expectations
- Strong operational and reliability judgment, including experience overseeing advanced diagnostics, incident response, and root cause analyses. Digital forensics is a plus, but not required
- A strong bias for automation and a low tolerance for repetitive manual work, paired with the judgment to know the rare cases when clickops is the right call and to coach your team accordingly
- A credible point of view on AI-native engineering and what an agentic SDLC requires operationally, from access and guardrails for agents to how CI/CD and incident response change when agents are writing and shipping code. Able to set a high bar for how AI is used responsibly to accelerate infrastructure development, investigate incidents, perform diagnostics, and make operational improvements
- Exceptional collaboration and communication skills to effectively engage and work alongside stakeholders from diverse disciplines and varying levels of technical expertise, including engineering leadership and non-technical partners
- Experience managing or coordinating technical projects and programs, including resource budgeting, estimates, tracking, and reporting
- Working knowledge of managing workloads in AWS and Snowflake. Experience with Azure, GCP, and/or Vercel is a plus
- Familiarity with managing multiple shared COTS and FOSS software applications in a multi-tenant environment
- Working knowledge of Docker, GitHub, Kubernetes, Python, Terraform/OpenTofu, and virtual networking sufficient to guide and evaluate your team's technical decisions
- Experience supporting regulated or validated workloads is helpful, but not required. We value strong infrastructure leadership, operational judgment, and the ability to learn our regulatory context more than prior pharmaceutical or biotech experience
What the job involves
- As the Engineering Manager for Infrastructure at Formation Bio, you will lead the team responsible for the reliability, security, and operational foundation of our engineering organization
- You will set technical direction, develop a high-performing team, and create the systems and operating practices that allow engineers to ship quickly and safely
- You're accountable for the pace, reliability, and quality of the systems your team builds and operates, and for creating the conditions in which engineers can grow, perform at a high level, and sustain that performance over time
- Formation Bio is an AI-native engineering organization, and Infrastructure has a central role in defining what that means operationally
- You and your team will develop the systems, access patterns, guardrails, delivery workflows, and observability needed for engineers and agents to build and operate production software safely
- We are looking for a leader with a credible point of view on how infrastructure and software delivery should evolve as AI-assisted and agent-authored code becomes a larger part of our systems
- You do not need to have solved every aspect of the agentic SDLC already, but you should be actively exploring the space and capable of turning emerging practices into reliable engineering systems
- You will partner closely with engineering, data science, tech ops, security, and domain experts across the drug development organization, representing Infrastructure and SRE in cross-functional planning and promoting strong reliability practices throughout the company
- This position is ideal for a manager who leads from the front: someone who is passionate about developing engineers, sets an urgent, high bar for the team's pace and quality, and is restless about finding the next thing that's slowing the org down before it becomes a blocker
- Your experience with engineering management, technical leadership, and infrastructure operations will be instrumental in driving Formation Bio's mission to bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently
- Hire, coach, and develop a team of infrastructure and site reliability engineers, including setting goals, delivering feedback, and managing performance
- Set the technical direction and roadmap for infrastructure and SRE, prioritizing work across reliability, security, cost, and developer experience in partnership with engineering leadership. Build operating practices and paved paths that allow the team to meet the pace required by the broader organization without compromising reliability or security
- Partner with engineers and data scientists to develop and deploy secure, observable, and reliable software across containerized applications, internal tools, ML pipelines, and AI model training workloads, including software developed with AI-assisted and agentic workflows. Ensure your team designs solutions that fill gaps and sees them through from concept to implementation
- Oversee the research, development, and maintenance of infrastructure services spanning multiple cloud providers and operating environments, including compute, load balancers, databases, and secrets management across development, staging, and production, as well as infrastructure that supports validated and GxP-relevant workloads
- Ensure the team creates, reviews, maintains, and optimizes IaC, container images, and CI/CD pipelines, and holds a high bar for engineering quality
- Review and provide feedback on requirements and design documents as well as operating and maintenance procedures, and ensure documentation and knowledge sharing practices stay strong across the team
- Drive knowledge sharing, training, and mentoring on infrastructure and SRE fundamentals throughout the organization
- Own the team's support rotation coverage including staffing, escalation paths, and incident retrospectives
- Manage team budgeting, resourcing, and reporting for infrastructure initiatives
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 in a deal worth up to hundreds of millions. Alongside this, the company has also added an early immunology program to its pipeline, signalling 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 and we encourage our team members to take the time that they need to recharge
- Parental Leave: All parents receive 12 weeks of fully paid bonding leave to welcome a newborn, adopted, or fostered child, and birthing parents are eligible for an additional 6-8 weeks of paid leave
- 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, including a yearly L&D stipend, internal mobility opportunities, in depth trainings, leadership coaching, and more.
- 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 biennial company-wide retreat, and various Employee Resource Groups.
Company values
- Think in first principles: We rigorously interrogate all possible paths to understand how we can do things differently and faster. We challenge assumptions, ask why, and solve problems from the ground up
- Be a scientist: We are curious and we continuously learn. We steelman, not strawman in debates. We listen, rapidly iterate, and make the best decisions with the evidence we have
- Deliver care: We lead with empathy. We value different perspectives, collaborate across teams, and support one another. We give and receive direct, actionable and timely feedback to hold ourselves and others to a high bar
- Champion the mission: We keep the mission as our north star and deliver impact for patients. We hold ourselves accountable for our wins and failures and keep moving forward
Company HQ
Midtown South, New York, NY
Articles
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.
Linhao Zhang
(Co-Founder)Linhao is also the Founder of Foundation 649. Previously, they were a Product Engineer at Oscar Insurance, a Software Engineer at Salesforce, and co-founder of Day 7 Photography.
Dan Neil
(CTO)Prior to joining Formation Bio in 2025, Dan was the Chief Data Officer at Tessera Therapeutics. Before that, they spent nearly 7 years at BenevolentAI in various roles, including SVP of AI & NY Site Lead and CTO.
Dale Klasko
(Senior Vice President, People)Dale built her career as a campus recruiting leader and strategic people business partner at growth-stage companies in the adtech & finservices industries.
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