Senior Data Engineer II, Technical Lead

About Formation Bio

Formation Bio is a tech and AI driven pharma company differentiated by radically more efficient drug development. 

Advancements in AI and drug discovery are creating more candidate drugs than the industry can progress because of the high cost and time of clinical trials. Recognizing that this development bottleneck may ultimately limit the number of new medicines that can reach patients, Formation Bio, founded in 2016 as TrialSpark Inc., has built technology platforms, processes, and capabilities to accelerate all aspects of drug development and clinical trials. Formation Bio partners, acquires, or in-licenses drugs from pharma companies, research organizations, and biotechs to develop programs past clinical proof of concept and beyond, ultimately helping to bring new medicines to patients. The company is backed by investors across pharma and tech, including a16z, Sequoia, Sanofi, Thrive Capital, Sam Altman, John Doerr, Spark Capital, SV Angel Growth, and others. 

You can read more at the following links:

• Our Vision for AI in Pharma
• Our Current Drug Portfolio
• Our Technology & Platform

At Formation Bio, our values are the driving force behind our mission to revolutionize the pharma industry. Every team and individual at the company shares these same values, and every team and individual plays a key part in our mission to bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently.

About the Position

Formation Bio is seeking a hands-on technical leader to shape the future of our Data Platform. This role is ideal for someone passionate about building scalable infrastructure at the intersection of data engineering and applied AI. You’ll lead efforts to ingest and transform unstructured and structured research, biomedical and clinical data into high-quality, actionable assets that power discovery and decision-making across the company. Your work will directly impact our most ambitious AI and data strategy initiatives.

This is a high-impact role for a builder who thrives on technical depth, mentorship, and platform thinking. You’ll lead the design of scalable systems that transform both structured and unstructured data into trusted, usable assets—enabling everything from analytics to AI-powered applications. Whether you're helping the organization make sense of complex documents like clinical protocols and drug labels or building robust data pipelines that power operational and scientific decision-making, your work will sit at the core of how Formation Bio turns data into impact.

Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Strategy

• Set and communicate technical direction across our Data Platform
• Mentor engineers in platform development, LLM workflows, and best practices for observability, quality, and governance.
• Guide planning and execution of roadmap priorities in alignment with AI and data strategy initiatives.

AI Data Engineering & Unstructured Data Workflows

• Design and operationalize pipelines for classification, entity extraction, summarization, and document parsing using LLMs and NER.
• Structure extracted outputs into well-defined schemas for downstream modeling, APIs, and semantic search.
• Integrate vector and graph databases to power retrieval, enrichment, and relationship modeling.

Platform Operations & Infrastructure

• Lead architectural decisions across the data platform to support modularity, scalability, and cost-efficiency.
• Lead efforts to set standards on orchestration, compute strategy, access control, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Establish standards for data governance, observability, and metadata management.
  

Ingestion & Data Modeling

• Lead development of ingestion pipelines for structured and unstructured data using Python, Dagster, and Rivery.
• Integrate AI-derived outputs into analytics-ready data models using SQL and dbt.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to ensure data assets are clean, documented, and actionable.

About You

• You have 7+ years of experience in data engineering, data platform, or applied AI roles, and you’ve led cross-functional technical projects that delivered real impact.
• You’ve built production-grade pipelines that extract structured data from unstructured sources using LLMs, NER, and other NLP techniques—and you’re fluent in evaluating output quality.
• You’re deeply comfortable with Python, SQL, dbt, and orchestration tools like Dagster or Airflow, and you treat observability and maintainability as non-negotiable.
• You have hands-on experience with vector and/or graph databases, and you’ve integrated them into intelligent retrieval or enrichment workflows.
• You bring strong architectural instincts and care deeply about building platforms that are extensible, observable, governed, and secure.
• You’ve worked with cloud data platforms like Snowflake, and are familiar with cost optimization, RBAC, and infrastructure governance.
• You’re excited by the chance to mentor others, set high technical standards, and help an organization use data and AI to make better decisions, faster.
• Bonus points if you’ve worked with biomedical, clinical, or scientific datasets, or have experience enabling agentic AI systems and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines.

Formation Bio is prioritizing hiring in key hubs, primarily the New York City and Boston metro areas, with additional growth in the Research Triangle (NC) and San Francisco Bay Area. Please only apply if you reside in these locations or are willing to relocate.

Compensation:

The target salary range for this role is: $220,000 - $280,000.

Salary ranges are informed by a number of factors including geographic location. The range provided includes base salary only. In addition to base salary, we offer equity, comprehensive benefits, generous perks, hybrid flexibility, and more. If this range doesn't match your expectations, please still apply because we may have something else for you.

You will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

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