Associate Director, Platform Engineering & Architecture

Celldex Therapeutics, Inc.; Hampton (VA); On-site; USD 154,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Celldex seeks an experienced principal engineer to own the architecture and deployment of a commercial insights platform. You will set foundational decisions, stand up infrastructure, and build backend services, with production ownership from day one.

Collaborating with data science and design, you will scale the platform to support brand and market access teams in a fast-moving, entrepreneurial environment.

Qualifications

• BS in computer science, software engineering, or related quantitative/engineering discipline with 8+ years building and shipping production web applications, including at least two where you were the lead or sole engineer accountable for architecture.
• MS or PhD with 5+ years building and shipping production web applications, including at least two where you were the lead or sole engineer accountable for architecture.
• Eight or more years building and shipping production web applications, including at least two where you were the lead or sole engineer accountable for architecture.
• You have taken at least one substantial system from nothing to live, and can walk through the decisions you made, which ones were wrong, and what you would do differently.
• You have owned a system in production over time, not only delivered one. You can talk about what broke, what you learned from operating it, and how the design changed as a result.
• Strong full-stack capability. A modern typed backend and a modern component-based front-end. We are not prescriptive about the exact stack, but you must have real depth on both sides rather than familiarity with one and exposure to the other.
• Cloud infrastructure ownership, ideally Azure: compute, networking, managed databases, infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines.
• Security competence sufficient to pass an information security review. Identity and access management on least privilege, network isolation, encryption in transit and at rest, secrets management, audit logging.
• Experience with regulated or high-consequence data: healthcare, financial services, insurance, or a comparable domain where an incorrect number has real consequences.
• Data literacy. You can read and write SQL against a cloud data warehouse, reason about why a query is slow and what it costs, understand what a cohort definition is, and present analytical output without misrepresenting it.
• The AI layer is authored in Python by the Director, and you will be the one making it run reliably in production. This is the one place we are prescriptive about language; the application stack itself is open.
• Demonstrated fluency with AI-assisted development, for example Claude Code, GitHub Copilot or equivalent. In interview we will ask what you shipped with them and where they failed you.
• You can work directly with non-engineers. There is no product manager. Requirements will come from brand leads, field leadership and medical, and you will help turn conversations into specifications.
• On site in Hampton, New Jersey four days per week.

Responsibilities

• Make the foundational architecture decisions and be accountable for them: hosting shape, application framework, how the application reads from our Databricks warehouse, authentication and authorization, environments, release process.
• Deliver the first vertical slice early. One real measure taken end to end into production: warehouse to API to authenticated web page to rendered chart, deployed, logged, access-controlled. Every part of the platform after it reuses that path.
• Build the backend services that expose governed data and generated summaries to the interface layer.
• Own the cloud environment. Provision it, secure it, monitor it, and be able to explain and defend it to our IT and information security teams.
• Own engineering practice for a team that does not yet have any: repository structure, code review, testing, CI/CD, documentation, dependency and secrets management.
• Run what you build. Monitoring, alerting, incident response, performance, cost, dependency upgrades and the steady stream of changes that follow real users.
• Build and ship product surfaces alongside the Design Engineer, who leads interface design and front-end craft. You will both write front-end code.
• Productionize the AI layer. The prompting, retrieval and evaluation logic is designed by the Director in Python; you make it run reliably, observably and within cost.
• Work AI-assisted, deliberately. This is a small team delivering what would ordinarily take more. Using modern AI development tooling well is part of the job, not a personal preference.

Skills

8+ years production web apps

Lead or sole architect ownership

Cloud infra ownership (Azure)

Security & data governance

SQL and data warehouse familiarity

Education

BS in CS or related field

MS or PhD in related field

Tools

Databricks

Snowflake

Job description

Celldex seeks an experienced principal engineer to own the architecture and deployment of a commercial insights platform. You will set foundational decisions, stand up infrastructure, and build backend services, with production ownership from day one.

Collaborating with data science and design, you will scale the platform to support brand and market access teams in a fast-moving, entrepreneurial environment.