Staff Software Engineer

Condor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

100% paid health, dental, vision, and life insurance

401(k) plan with company match

Unlimited PTO

Job summary

A leading financial intelligence firm for clinical development is hiring a Senior Backend and Data Platform Engineer in San Francisco, CA. The role focuses on building robust data pipelines and backend services to power their financial intelligence platform. Candidates should have extensive experience in software engineering, particularly in backend development and data engineering, with a strong emphasis on SQL and AI-powered data systems. Competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits are offered.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with a focus on backend development.
• Deep expertise in SQL and relational database design, including performance tuning.
• Production experience with AI-powered data systems and embedding pipelines.
• Production AI-powered data systems experience including vector databases (pgvector) and embedding pipelines.
• Willingness to contribute to React codebases to deliver data-heavy features end-to-end.
• Familiarity with data quality validation, testing, and monitoring in production.
• Bachelor’s degree in CS, CE, or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain scalable data pipelines for financial and clinical trial data.
• Develop backend services that expose high-quality financial data.
• Optimize database performance for large-scale datasets.
• Optimize database performance, queries, and batch jobs for large datasets.
• Contribute to data infrastructure architecture and integration with LLM APIs.
• Collaborate with product managers and analysts to translate requirements into durable datasets and APIs.
• Contribute to frontend implementations for data-heavy features.
• Mentor engineers on data modeling, SQL, ETL patterns, and observability.

Skills

Backend development

Data engineering

SQL

ETL/ELT pipelines

AI-powered data systems

Python

Dagster/Airflow

React basics

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

PostgreSQL

Airflow

Django

Snowflake

dbt

Great Expectations

Job description

About Condor

Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars are invested to discover and develop new therapies, yet the financial infrastructure behind that work has not kept pace. Clinical operations and finance live in disconnected worlds, forcing teams to make high‑stakes decisions using fragmented tools and static data. Condor exists to change that. We are a system of action, building the financial intelligence layer that will power the next era of clinical development. Condor connects clinical operations, vendor activity, and financial signals into a single, real‑time intelligence layer, giving R&D and finance leaders true command over how their organizations operate. Condor is pharma‑native, AI‑driven infrastructure built to scale industry standards we helped define with Big 4 partners. It powers prediction, control, and execution across the most complex R&D environments in the world.

Why This Matters Now

Condor has moved past proving the concept. Enterprise teams already trust Condor to run critical operations and finance. The work ahead is the hardest part: scaling something people depend on when the stakes are this high. Condor is a high‑growth company backed by top institutional partners like Felicis and 645 Ventures, growing rapidly with Top 200 biopharma companies. This is a rare opportunity to help build foundational infrastructure that will shape how new therapies reach patients.

The Role

We are looking for a Senior Backend and Data Platform Engineer to help build the core data infrastructure behind Condor’s financial intelligence platform. This role sits at the heart of how Condor turns complex clinical and financial activity into intelligence that enterprise biopharma teams trust to run their operations. You will design and own the data foundations that power Condor’s financial engine and AI‑driven capabilities. That means modeling highly complex, high‑stakes data, building reliable pipelines and services, and ensuring that downstream product features and intelligence workflows operate with accuracy, consistency, and scale. The systems you build will directly support mission‑critical finance and operational use cases, not dashboards or experiments. This is a hands‑on, senior engineering role with real ownership. You will work across backend services, data pipelines, and APIs, taking features from design through production. You will help define schemas, transformations, and architectural patterns that become the backbone of the platform as it scales. While the primary focus is backend and data engineering, you are expected to engage pragmatically across the stack to ensure data and intelligence are surfaced correctly in the product. This role is for engineers who want to build durable infrastructure under real‑world complexity, where correctness, trust, and scale are not optional, and where the systems you design will shape how an entire industry operates.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines that ingest, normalize, and transform financial and clinical trial data from multiple internal and external sources, with a focus on making data suitable for analytics, reporting, and LLM‑based AI agents.
• Develop backend services and data access layers that expose high‑quality financial data to internal systems and customer‑facing features, ensuring data is structured for direct consumption by LLMs and automated workflows.
• Implement and operate embedding pipelines and vectorized representations of structured and semi‑structured data to support semantic search, RAG, and agentic workflows.
• Optimize database performance, query execution, and batch processing jobs to support large‑scale financial datasets and AI‑driven access patterns.
• Participate in architectural decisions around data infrastructure, storage strategies, and integration with LLMs, embeddings, and vector databases.
• Work closely with product managers and analysts to translate business requirements into durable datasets, metrics, and APIs.
• Contribute to frontend implementations to ensure data‑heavy and AI‑enabled features are presented clearly and correctly.
• Mentor other engineers on data modeling best practices, SQL performance optimization, ETL design patterns, and building reliable, observable data systems.

Required Skills & Experience

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development and data engineering.
• Deep expertise in SQL and relational database design (PostgreSQL, MySQL, or similar), including complex analytical queries and performance tuning.
• Experience building and operating ETL or ELT pipelines using orchestration frameworks (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, or AWS Step Functions).
• Production experience building AI‑powered data systems, including vector databases (pgvector, Pinecone), embedding pipelines, and designing data access patterns for RAG and agentic workflows.
• A pragmatic approach to the full stack, including a willingness to contribute to React codebases to ensure data‑heavy features are delivered end‑to‑end.
• Familiarity with data quality validation, testing, and monitoring practices in production systems.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong proficiency in Python, with experience using web frameworks (Django, DRF).
• Experience working with modern data warehouse platforms (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift).
• Experience integrating backend systems or data pipelines with LLM APIs for enrichment, summarization, or analysis.
• Experience with data transformation and validation tools (dbt, Great Expectations).
• Experience building production AI features end‑to‑end, including LLM integration, prompt engineering, agentic workflows, and observability/evaluation frameworks.
• Experience working in a Series A‑C startup with rapid scale.

What we offer

• Competitive compensation and meaningful equity participation
• Comprehensive employee benefits, including 100% company‑paid health, dental, vision, and life insurance
• 401(k) plan with a 3% company match that vests immediately
• Unlimited PTO

Condor is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected status.