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 onsite
Salary: £ 80 000 - £ 120 000 plus equity