Senior AI-Driven Backend Engineer for Pharma Platforms

Formation Bio; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 186,000 - 232,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

Formation Bio, a tech- and AI-driven pharma company, seeks a Senior Software Engineer to build high-leverage software across the org. You will turn ambiguous problems into products and systems that help people, applications, AI Enabled Employees, and Agents make better decisions and move faster.

This is an AI-native engineering role. You will use modern AI and agentic development tools as a core part of how you explore, build, test, and operate software, ensuring interfaces, data access,

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building and shipping production software.
• Experience in pharmaceutical, biology, and/or biotechnology software is a strong plus.
• Strong backend and systems engineering fundamentals.
• Daily experience using AI tools, LLMs, or agentic development systems.
• Experience building AI-enabled software or ML-powered products is a strong plus.
• Familiarity with ML concepts such as training vs inference, embeddings, retrieval, evaluation, data quality is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own meaningful product or platform outcomes from problem definition through design, implementation, launch, and iteration.
• Build and operate production services, APIs, integrations, databases, asynchronous workflows, and distributed systems.
• Build software for people, applications, AI Enabled Employees, and Agents, including the tools, APIs, permissions, state, observability, and failure handling required for reliable use.
• Design and ship AI-enabled and agentic workflows, including tool use, retrieval, data access, evaluation, and appropriate human review.
• Use LLMs and agentic coding systems daily for exploration, prototyping, implementation, testing, debugging, documentation, and automation while maintaining a high bar for validation.
• Partner with Data Engineering on application data models, data products, data contracts, and access patterns.
• Partner with Data Science on ML-powered capabilities, model interfaces, evaluation, and production integration.
• Partner with SRE on deployment, reliability, observability, security, and infrastructure decisions.
• Make pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, quality, maintainability, and future flexibility. Use engineering rigor proportional to the risk and context of the system.
• Reprioritize quickly as new information changes the highest-value path, and communicate decisions and tradeoffs clearly to technical and non-technical partners.
• Review designs and code, mentor engineers, and raise the bar for product judgment and engineering quality.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

APIs

AI tooling

Communication

Job description

Formation Bio, a tech- and AI-driven pharma company, seeks a Senior Software Engineer to build high-leverage software across the org. You will turn ambiguous problems into products and systems that help people, applications, AI Enabled Employees, and Agents make better decisions and move faster.

This is an AI-native engineering role. You will use modern AI and agentic development tools as a core part of how you explore, build, test, and operate software, ensuring interfaces, data access,