Job Description
Senior Software Engineer
Department: Engineering
Employment Type: Full Time
Location: San Mateo, CA
The role: BigHat Biosciences is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our engineering team. This role is for experienced engineers ready to own a significant area of our platform as a subject-matter expert, lead epics end-to-end, and shape the architecture and engineering practices that support the design, build, and testing of therapeutic antibodies at scale. You will work closely with engineers, product partners, and laboratory scientists to build and evolve the internal software systems at the center of our science.
This role is leveled as Senior Software Engineer I. At this level, you operate as a subject-matter expert in your area, working with a high degree of independence and regularly leading epics. Candidates with prior experience in biotech, life sciences, or scientific software may be considered with fewer total years of software engineering experience.
*At BigHat we believe in titles that commensurate with skill set, relative organizational impact, and value contribution; more experienced candidates are encouraged to apply, with the understanding that r esponsibilities and title would adjust as appropriate.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead projects end-to-end, from PRD through implementation, testing, release, and validation against the customer success metric.
- Own one or more major areas of BigHat's internally developed, cloud-based platform as a subject-matter expert, and serve as a cross-team and cross-org resource for those areas.
- Take on net-new, 0-to-1 work from specification, designing interactions between features and the infrastructure that supports them, and producing novel solutions where existing patterns fall short.
- Collaborate with, and increasingly manage, the relationship with scientists and product owners to translate real-world lab workflows into reliable software, and to iterate on success metrics.
- Operate and run engineering processes: PRD reviews, stand-ups, PR approvals, and other team ceremonies.
- Own the quality and outcomes of your work and your epics, including debugging, test failures, and production issues, anticipating next steps and owning the trajectory of major features.
- Drive technical depth across the codebase, infrastructure, and systems, and actively improve the design and architectural principles the team works within.
- Design and build high-quality software across front-end (UI/UX) and back-end systems, with system-level expertise in the databases, AWS services, runtimes, and processes that underpin them.
- Lead and review technical designs and PRDs; contribute architectural direction and surface risks and tradeoffs early.
- Write, maintain, and raise the bar on automated testing to ensure correctness, reliability, and maintainability.
- Run code reviews as a routine approver, providing thoughtful, high-leverage feedback that develops other engineers.
- Diagnose and resolve complex issues across production and development environments, including across system and environment boundaries.
- Improve internal engineering practices, documentation, tooling, and architecture; help set and transmit appropriate urgency in partnership with engineering leaders.
Skills Knowledge and Expertise
- You have a track record of owning features and epics end to end in a production software environment.
- You are an SME in at least one significant technical area and are reaching to master new ones.
- You work highly independently and initiate the collaborations needed to deliver work that bridges many parts of the codebase.
- You balance development, architecture, and process effectively, and help the team prioritize where effort yields the most impact.
- You communicate clearly about progress, risks, and tradeoffs, and your own outcomes, following issues through to resolution and validating that you've met the customer's needs.
- You are motivated by building software that supports real users doing complex, high-stakes scientific work.
- You adapt well as priorities and focus areas shift, and you collaborate effectively with engineers inside and outside your direct team.
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building and owning production systems, including demonstrated end-to-end ownership of features or epics, OR
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with prior experience in biotech, life sciences, laboratory environments, or scientific software, where domain knowledge meaningfully accelerates impact.
Depth in several of the following, with the ability to make and improve system- and architecture-level decisions:
- TypeScript, React, Material-UI, Vega
- Python 3, SQLAlchemy
- RESTful API design
- AWS (CDK, Lambda, Step Functions, ECS/Batch, Fargate, API Gateway, Athena)
- Relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL), including schema and query design
- Pandas
- PyTorch or other ML frameworks (nice to have, not required)
Total Rewards
The salary estimated for this position is $198,00 - $215,000 + bonus + options + benefits. Compensation will vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Actual compensation will be confirmed in writing at the time of the offer.
What BigHat Offers:
- Range of health insurance plan options through Anthem and Kaiser (monthly credit if benefit waived)
- Dental, and vision coverage through Guardian
- Additional well-being benefits through Nayya, OneMedical, Wagmo, Rula, and more
- 401(k) with company match
- DTO, two weeks of company-wide shutdown, and 12 company holidays
- Paid parental leave
