Principal Data Engineer

The role

You will lead the architecture and evolution of the data platform for human genetics, multi-omics, and high-content imaging programs. You will set the direction for the AWS environment, pipelines, catalog, and access layers.

What you will do

• Serve as technical owner and architect of the 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 the data lake, managed orchestration, metadata and data ingestion workflows.
• 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).
• Infrastructure as code (CloudFormation/CDK), CI/CD, containers, and observability.
• 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).

Nice to have

• 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.

Benefits

• Healthcare coverage
• Annual incentive program
• Retirement benefits
• A broad range of other benefits

About the company

Vesalius Therapeutics is pioneering a new platform to generate breakthrough treatments for common diseases. It was founded in 2019 by Flagship Pioneering.