Bioinformatics

Our client in the Life Science industry is start up in stealth mode backed by great funding. They are seeking a Principal Data Engineer to lead the data and infrastructure systems powering the foundation model transforming drug development. Requirements: Principal-level data engineering experience in life sciences is essential. End-to-end ownership of data workflows is required, from extraction and transformation to clean Parquet outputs for machine learning teams. Hands-on familiarity with genomics data is needed, including raw FASTQ files and outputs from Illumina sequencers. Experience with metabolomics data is important, particularly untargeted mass spectrometry. Close collaboration with wet lab teams is expected, with practical understanding of assays and protocol development. Cloud data infrastructure must be set up from scratch, including compute, storage, networking, and access controls. Strong Python and SQL skills are required, along with sound practices for data modeling, data quality, lineage, and monitoring. Reliable, repeatable pipelines should be built with testing, version control, and clear documentation. Preference: Experience building data lakes or lakehouses and automating batch workflows (for example, with Airflow) is beneficial. Familiarity with NGS pipelines such as quality control, alignment or assembly, and variant calling, as well as mass spectrometry data analysis, is advantageous. Use of Infrastructure as Code (such as Terraform), containerization (Docker), and CI/CD for deploying data systems is desirable. Prior 0-to-1 startup experience and close collaboration with machine learning and biology teams are strong positives. Why Join Design and build the cloud infrastructure and data pipelines that power distributed ML training and scalable biological data workflows—without legacy constraints. Work with first-of-their-kind, multi-modal datasets to support foundation model training at AlphaFold scale—this is a builder role with deep technical ownership. Join as a founding member of the engineering team with significant equity and end-to-end system ownership See your work directly enable drug discoveries that will impact millions, collaborating with world-leading scientists in microbiome research and machine learning. Location: London - 3 days onsiteSalary: £ 80 000 - £ 120 000 plus equity