Senior Software Engineer

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: San Mateo, CA

Description

Key Responsibilities

• Lead projects end-to-end, from PRD through implementation, testing, release, and validation against the customer success metric.
• Own one or more major areas of BigHat's internally developed, cloud-based platform as a subject-matter expert, and serve as a cross-team and cross-org resource for those areas.
• Take on net-new, 0-to-1 work from specification, designing interactions between features and the infrastructure that supports them, and producing novel solutions where existing patterns fall short.
• Collaborate with, and increasingly manage, the relationship with scientists and product owners to translate real-world lab workflows into reliable software, and to iterate on success metrics.
• Operate and run engineering processes: PRD reviews, stand-ups, PR approvals, and other team ceremonies.
• Own the quality and outcomes of your work and your epics, including debugging, test failures, and production issues, anticipating next steps and owning the trajectory of major features.
• Drive technical depth across the codebase, infrastructure, and systems, and actively improve the design and architectural principles the team works within.
• Design and build high-quality software across front-end (UI/UX) and back-end systems, with system-level expertise in the databases, AWS services, runtimes, and processes that underpin them.
• Lead and review technical designs and PRDs; contribute architectural direction and surface risks and tradeoffs early.
• Write, maintain, and raise the bar on automated testing to ensure correctness, reliability, and maintainability.
• Run code reviews as a routine approver, providing thoughtful, high-leverage feedback that develops other engineers.
• Diagnose and resolve complex issues across production and development environments, including across system and environment boundaries.
• Improve internal engineering practices, documentation, tooling, and architecture; help set and transmit appropriate urgency in partnership with engineering leaders.

Skills Knowledge and Expertise

• You have a track record of owning features and epics end to end in a production software environment.
• You are an SME in at least one significant technical area and are reaching to master new ones.
• You work highly independently and initiate the collaborations needed to deliver work that bridges many parts of the codebase.
• You balance development, architecture, and process effectively, and help the team prioritize where effort yields the most impact.
• You communicate clearly about progress, risks, and tradeoffs, and your own outcomes, following issues through to resolution and validating that you've met the customer's needs.
• You are motivated by building software that supports real users doing complex, high-stakes scientific work.
• You adapt well as priorities and focus areas shift, and you collaborate effectively with engineers inside and outside your direct team.
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building and owning production systems, including demonstrated end-to-end ownership of features or epics, OR
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with prior experience in biotech, life sciences, laboratory environments, or scientific software, where domain knowledge meaningfully accelerates impact.

• TypeScript, React, Material-UI, Vega
• Python 3, SQLAlchemy
• RESTful API design
• AWS (CDK, Lambda, Step Functions, ECS/Batch, Fargate, API Gateway, Athena)
• Relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL), including schema and query design
• Pandas
• PyTorch or other ML frameworks (nice to have, not required)

Total Rewards

• Range of health insurance plan options through Anthem and Kaiser (monthly credit if benefit waived)
• Dental, and vision coverage through Guardian
• Additional well-being benefits through Nayya, OneMedical, Wagmo, Rula, and more
• 401(k) with company match
• DTO, two weeks of company-wide shutdown, and 12 company holidays
• Paid parental leave