Lead Software Engineer, Platform

PostEra is building a modern, 21st-century biopharma. We use Proton , our AI platform for medicinal chemistry, to accelerate the discovery of new medicines for patients. PostEra is advancing an internal pipeline focused on Women's Health and Reproductive Medicine while also advancing small-molecule programs through partnerships with biopharma. We've closed over $1Bn in AI partnerships, including four multi-year agreements with Pfizer and Amgen . We've also been an active participant in open-science projects, leading a $68M antiviral drug discovery center for pandemic preparedness, which followed on from the success of COVID Moonshot , the world's largest open-science initiative to develop a COVID antiviral. PostEra's Organizational Structure: · We believe time spent navigating complex hierarchies in organizations is better invested in the pursuit of novel technology and scientific discoveries. As such, our organizational structure is intentionally minimalist. · We promote a culture where individual achievement is celebrated through proportional compensation and internal recognition, including meaningful promotions. · Ultimately, our collective focus is delivering cures to patients, which we believe needs a huge amount of cross-disciplinary collaboration, so we've fitted our organizational structure to serve that end. Role Overview: In this role, you will be helping PostEra deliver on its mission of getting therapies to patients by shaping systems design decisions around our drug discovery platform, Proton. Design focus areas include things like data architecture, microservice design, and patterns for running async compute-heavy ML jobs. In addition, you will keep close to the codebase by helping build and improve the platform upon which our team delivers features. You will lead by example, championing best practices in software development and engineering culture, while also spearheading innovative projects that push the boundaries of drug discovery. You will make well thought out decisions about system architecture, including API design, application boundaries, and microservice communication. These systems should support the Proton platform in its pursuit to trivially handle many concurrent drug discovery projects running in parallel at industry-leading speed. Your leadership style should foster an environment of learning and improvement within our engineering team in which you should strive to build technical rapport with colleagues through coding and code review. We are looking for someone who was substantial experience designing, building, and operating production systems at scale, and who enjoys mentoring engineers through direct technical collaboration. Key Responsibilities: Technical Leadership and Execution: Lead the architectural design and contribute to the development of scalable web applications and microservices. Deep technical knowledge and professional experience: · Using cloud providers (ideally AWS), container orchestration frameworks, and IaC best practices. · Working with teams who ship products using web-dev stacks composed of Python, modern frontend frameworks, and relational databases like PostgreSQL. Mentorship and Collaboration : Play a pivotal role in mentoring engineers, promoting a culture of cross-team collaboration and continuous learning. Candidate will: · Be instrumental in facilitating knowledge sharing sessions, code reviews, and defining team-wide technical standards. · Nurture the technical growth of our team members, while directly managing a small team of direct reports, with the possibility of growing into a larger people leadership role. Projects You May Lead: Innovative Drug Discovery Projects : Collaborate with scientists and ML experts to tackle challenges directly contributing to the discovery of novel medicines. Specific challenges may include projects such as expanding molecular search to 100B+ scale, designing automated AI-medicinal-chemist workflows, bringing novel ML research to production, and creating tools for real-time data analysis in drug design processes. Engineering Excellence Initiatives : Drive projects focused on enhancing our engineering framework such as architecting backend interactions with ML systems, improving our CI/CD processes, setting new standards for code quality and testing, incorporating AI tooling into our development processes, and implementing monitoring solutions that offer real-time insights into our applications' performance. Key Requirements: · 8+ years of professional software engineering experience and a bachelor's degree (or more advanced education) to succeed in this role · Experience in systems design and backend web development · Strong communication skills · Experience with technical mentorship focus or people management responsibilities Nice to Haves: Candidate is more likely to succeed in this role if they also have: · Expertise in a python based backend web framework (we use Django, for example) · Experience integrating ML systems into production services/software · Familiarity with container orchestration or workflow systems (like: Kubernetes, Kubeflow, Argo, Airflow) · Have some familiarity with data pipelines · Experience with designing agentic workflows/context engineering Visit us at postera.ai