Data Platform Engineer

Outpost Bio; Massachusetts; On-site; USD 115,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical/dental/vision

401(k) match

Disability insurance

Commuter stipend

PTO 25 days

Birthday off

Winter break

Home office stipend

Conference costs

Job summary

Outpost Bio is hiring a Data Platform Engineer in Boston to build and operate pipelines moving data from the lab to analysis-ready datasets. You will sit between wet-lab data producers and ML teams, owning datasets and ensuring repeatable, auditable pipelines.

We value 3–5 years of Python data infra, experience with Dagster/Airflow, and AWS expertise. You will collaborate across CROs and science teams, improving reliability, testing, and deployment while shaping the data platform for ML work.

Qualifications

• 3–5 years building and operating production data infrastructure in Python.
• Experience with pipelines, testing, deployment, and CI.
• Familiar with Dagster, Airflow, or Prefect on AWS (Batch/Fargate/S3).

Responsibilities

• Build and operate pipelines from raw data to analysis-ready data.
• Own datasets: schema stability, validation, provenance, versioning.
• Collaborate with wet-lab CROs and computational teams.
• Maintain good engineering practices: code review, tests, CI.
• Ensure training and inference runs are traceable with versioned inputs.

Job description

Data Platform Engineer

Application Deadline: 19 October 2026

Department: Informatics

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Boston

Compensation: $115,000 - $130,000 / year

Description

We are hiring a Data Platform Engineer to build and operate the pipelines that take raw data through to analysis-ready datasets, and to own the datasets those pipelines produce. Today that means running orchestration over cloud compute, supporting both CRO deliveries and wet-lab experiment cycles.

You will sit between the wet lab and CROs who generate our data and the computational biology and ML teams who consume it, and you will make training and inference runs traceable enough to explain months after they happened.

We're hiring one person for this role, and they can be based in either London or Boston.

Here is our timeline for hiring this role:

• Now until October 19th: Accepting applications
• October 26th: Planned start for interviews

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the pipelines that take raw data through to analysis-ready datasets. Routine runs should complete without someone having to watch or shepherd them.
• Own the datasets those pipelines produce: schema stability, validation, provenance, versioning and documentation, along with the transformation layer that turns processed outputs into tables people can actually query. Scientists and downstream systems should be able to rely on an output without first checking what changed upstream.
• Work with stakeholders on either side of the data, the wet lab and CROs who generate it and the computational biology and ML teams who consume it. That means understanding how the data is produced and what it is used for. When a problem recurs, sometimes the right fix is in the pipeline and sometimes it is in how the data is produced or delivered.
• Maintain good engineering practice across the dry-lab codebase: useful code review, meaningful tests, CI, and failures that are visible and diagnosable.
• Make training and inference runs traceable through versioned inputs, recorded configuration, and artifacts that can be tied back to the data and code that produced them, so that an important run can be explained months after it happened.

Your background

• Three to five years building and operating production data infrastructure, mainly in Python. You have owned pipelines that other people depended on and dealt with them when they failed.
• You have worked in a team with solid engineering practice and know what good review, testing and deployment look like day to day.
• Comfortable with a workflow orchestrator such as Dagster, Airflow or Prefect, and with configuring cloud compute directly. We run on AWS, so Batch, Fargate and S3 experience matters.
• You can work from a specification, and you will call out gaps or bad assumptions rather than quietly implementing them.
• You can talk to a scientist about how their data is generated, understand the practical constraints, and tell those apart from preferences or one-off requests.
• You are motivated by making systems reliable and maintainable.
• Nice to have: biological or scientific data, particularly sequencing or omics, including the awkward file formats and incomplete metadata that come with it; Dagster in production and infrastructure-as-code with Terraform or equivalent; analytical stores such as ClickHouse or DuckDB and transformation tooling such as dbt or SQLMesh; working closely with a wet lab, or with data whose quality depends partly on what happens at the bench; building data infrastructure for LLM or agentic systems, where changes to schemas, metadata or provenance can silently affect the output.

Why Join Outpost Bio?

• You'll own real equity in what you build. We offer meaningful stock options because we believe the people building this company should share in what it becomes. We want teammates who think like owners, and we structure compensation to reflect that.
• Outstanding benefits. Full medical, dental and vision from day one, with Outpost covering 100% of the employee premium on the base plan and 50% for dependents. 401(k) with a 3% match. Short and long-term disability, employer paid. 50% of your MBTA Perq commuter pass. 25 days PTO plus your birthday off, and a paid winter break between Christmas Eve and New Year.
• An ML Lab-in-the-Loop. Your work feeds directly into Outpost's AI platform, and the platform feeds back into the next experiment. The loop between the wet lab, the data and the models runs in days, not years, and you'll iterate inside it whichever side you sit on.
• How we work. Time in the lab follows the experiments rather than a fixed schedule, and is dependent on the team's rhythm. Flexible hours around a 10am to 4pm core outside of that, and up to two weeks a year working from anywhere. Home office stipend and company computer. We cover conference costs and want you presenting your work, and every quarter you get a budget for drinks or coffee to learn from peers at other companies.
• Small team, outsized reach. You're joining a small founding team backed by top-tier investors with deep connections across AI and bio. The science you do here will directly shape how pharma and consumer companies understand molecule and microbiome interactions.