Principal Data Engineer

Vesalius Therapeutics; Cambridge (MA); On-site; USD 179,000 - 236,000; Full time

Job summary

Vesalius Therapeutics is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to lead the architecture of our data platform supporting human genetics, multi-omics, and high-content imaging research in Cambridge, MA. You will define the roadmap for cloud data engineering, orchestration, warehousing, and access layers, with broad technical authority and a hands-on leadership style.

Join a fast-growing biotech team modernizing infrastructure to enable genotype-driven discoveries and scalable data science

Qualifications

• 10+ years building and operating production data infrastructure.
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• Deep AWS expertise: S3, IAM, EC2, Batch, Lambda, Spark.
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• Strong Python and SQL, with production-grade pipelines.
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• Experience with workflow orchestration tools and selecting among them.
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• Infrastructure as code, CI/CD, containers, and observability are core.
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• Data modelling and warehouse/lakehouse design with metadata tracing.
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• Cost governance at scale across large data assets.
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• Fluency with scientific data semantics and collaboration with scientists.
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Responsibilities

• Serve as technical owner and architect of our AWS environment and data platform.
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• Lead cost governance, budgeting, tagging, rightsizing, and lifecycle management.
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• Define developer operations for data platforms, including IaC and CI/CD.
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• Upgrade data lake, orchestration, metadata, and data ingestion workflows.
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• Collaborate with ML and computational biology leaders to align platform with modelling needs.

Skills

10+ years data infra

AWS expertise

Python & SQL

Workflow orchestration

Infrastructure as code

CI/CD

Data modelling

Cost governance

Scientific data semantics

Tools

Nextflow

Airflow

Temporal

Step Functions

Redun

CloudFormation/CDK

Spark/EMR

Databricks

OpenMetadata

Snowflake

SageMaker

MLflow/Weights & Biases

Job description

What if you could join a rapidly growing company and play a critical role in bringing new medicines to patients by helping scale the programmable infrastructure behind a new human cellular biology platform?

About Vesalius

Vesalius Therapeutics is pioneering a new platform to generate breakthrough treatments for common diseases. Our platform combines large-scale human genetics, genomics, stem cell studies, high-dimensional cellular phenotyping, and artificial intelligence to uncover causal biology and identify optimal intervention points for new therapies. Vesalius was founded in 2019 by Flagship Pioneering.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Principal Data Engineer to lead the architecture and evolution of the data platform underpinning our human genetics, multi-omics, and high-content imaging programs.

This is a senior, hands-on leadership role with broad technical authority. As the architectural lead for data engineering, you will set the direction for our AWS environment and the pipelines, catalog, and access layers built on it, defining the technical roadmap and the standards others build against. The scope spans core cloud data engineering (orchestration, warehousing, infrastructure as code, cost governance) and the distinctive challenges of scientific data: connecting each microscopy image to its cell line, donor, and study of origin, and enabling scientists to answer genotype questions directly, without specialist intervention.

You will join a focused, high-impact team supporting a research organization whose data generation and analytical ambitions are expanding rapidly. Our platform is established and productive, and is now entering a deliberate modernization phase. You will lead that transition, with significant influence over the platform's next-generation architecture.

At Flagship, we accept impossible missions to enable bigger leaps. Our core values guide us through uncertainty and toward lasting impact.

Role Responsabilities

• Serve as technical owner and architect of our AWS environment, including account structure, IAM, networking, compute, and storage.
• Lead and extend cost governance, including budgets, alerting, tagging enforcement, rightsizing, and storage lifecycle and tiering.
• Define and own developer operations for the data platform, including infrastructure as code, CI/CD, container builds, and secrets and environment management.
• Upgrade our data lake, managed orchestration, metadata and data ingestion workflows to scale with future data production and enhance the infrastructure that transfers data from the lab to the cloud.
• Partner with ML and computational biology leaders to define the interface between platform and modelling.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years building and operating production data infrastructure, with a track record of architecting and owning platforms end to end.
• Deep AWS expertise: S3, IAM, EC2, Batch, Lambda, and Spark (EMR or equivalent). Experience as technical owner of production cloud environments, including multi-account architecture and cross-account access.
• Strong Python and SQL, with a background in production-grade pipeline development.
• Production experience with workflow orchestration (Nextflow, Airflow, Temporal, Step Functions, Redun, or similar) and the judgement to evaluate and select among them.
• Infrastructure as code (CloudFormation/CDK), CI/CD, containers, and observability. DevOps is a core competency for this role.
• Data modelling and warehouse or lakehouse design, including metadata management, lineage, and data quality practice.
• Cost governance at scale, including budgets, tagging, rightsizing, and storage lifecycle across hundreds of terabytes.
• Fluency with scientific data semantics (studies, samples, donors, cell lines, assays) and the ability to partner directly with scientists to translate their questions into data models.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with genetics and genomics data.
• Microscopy or high-content screening data, including large binary object stores, transfer optimization, and image streaming for model training.
• Databricks, OpenMetadata, or a comparable catalog in production.
• Snowflake, particularly governed access patterns over cloud object storage.
• ML infrastructure: SageMaker or Databricks ML, MLflow or Weights & Biases, feature stores.
• Serving data to LLM or agent clients (MCP servers, tool APIs).
• Experience leading data platform architecture as a senior or principal individual contributor, ideally in biotech, pharma R&D, or a research institute.

We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

We recognize that great candidates often bring unique strengths without fulfilling every qualification. If you have some of the experience listed above but not all, please apply anyway. We are dedicated to building diverse and inclusive teams and look forward to learning more about your background and interest in Flagship.

The salary range for this role is $179,000 - $236,000. Compensation for the role will depend on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies, and experience. Vesalius Therapeutics currently offers healthcare coverage, annual incentive program, retirement benefits and a broad range of other benefits. Compensation and benefits information is based on Vesalius Therapeutics's good faith estimate as of the date of publication and may be modified in the future.

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