TetraScience · 16 hours ago
Lead Platform Engineer - Search Platform
United States
Full-time
Remote
Lead/Staff
10+ years expTetraScience is the Scientific Data and AI company, catalyzing the Scientific AI revolution through innovative lab data management solutions. The Lead Platform Engineer will expand the scientific search platform, focusing on advanced search capabilities and collaborating with cross-functional teams to enhance scientific retrieval and decision-making processes.
BiotechnologyData IntegrationData ManagementInternet of ThingsLife SciencePharmaceuticalSoftware
No H1B
Responsibilities
Lead by example to architect and code the next-generation scientific search engine, building a system that can reason over billions of scientific data points—from chemical structures (SMILES) to unstructured lab documents and instrument data
Engineer sophisticated hybrid search pipelines that blend sparse (keyword), structured (metadata), and dense (vector) retrieval. You will go beyond out-of-the-box OpenSearch to design custom ranking logic, reciprocal rank fusion, and relevance tuning that surfaces the exact "needle in the haystack" for drug discovery
Own and operate the Search Platform infrastructure, ensuring high availability, scalability, performance, and observability across indexing, embedding generation, and query execution
Develop and maintain backend services and APIs in Python and TypeScript that power search capabilities for scientists, data engineers, and AI applications
Collaborate with Applied AI Scientists to integrate embeddings, transformer models, and chemical fingerprints into production search workflows
Architect and implement scientific entity resolution and knowledge graph pipelines to transform raw text into interconnected knowledge. You will design systems that extract and link chemical and biological entities (NER/NED) from unstructured documents, enabling the search engine to "understand" relationships between compounds, targets, and assays
Continuously improve search quality through evaluation metrics such as precision@K, recall@K, MRR, and relevance testing with real scientific use cases
Ensure security, compliance, and tenant isolation as part of operating search services in enterprise bio-pharma environments
Contribute to architectural decisions, technical strategy, and platform-wide improvements to accelerate scientific insight generation
Qualification
Required
10+ years of backend or platform engineering experience building distributed, production grade systems
Hands-on experience with search technologies such as Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Lucene, or vector databases
Strong understanding of semantic search concepts embeddings, transformers, similarity scoring, ranking logic, relevance tuning, hybrid retrieval
Expert-level coding skills in TypeScript and Python building robust APIs and backend services
Experience building and operating microservices or search infrastructure on cloud platforms (AWS preferred), including containerization, CI/CD, observability, and performance tuning
Familiarity with scientific or unstructured data processing, such as documents, tables, analytical results, or experimental datasets
Strong problem solving skills, with the ability to navigate ambiguous scientific workflows and translate them into engineered systems
Excellent communication and collaboration skills comfortable working alongside scientists, AI researchers, and product teams
Exposure to NLP, LLMs, embedding generation, or retrieval-augmented workflows
Experience with large-scale data platforms such as Databricks, Lakehouse architectures, or distributed indexing systems
Preferred
Experience with cheminformatics tools and libraries (e.g., RDKit), including molecular fingerprints, similarity metrics, or substructure search
Prior experience implementing chemical search systems, such as SMILES parsing, normalization, or chemical indexing
Knowledge of vector databases / embeddings stores (e.g., OpenSearch) to support semantic search and RAG
Benefits
100% employer-paid benefits for all eligible employees and immediate family members
Unlimited paid time off (PTO)
401K
Flexible working arrangements - Remote work
Company paid Life Insurance, LTD/STD
A culture of continuous improvement where you can grow your career and get coaching
Company
TetraScience
TetraScience is an R&D cloud data management company that empowers transformation in life sciences and drug discovery.
201-500 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Growth StageTotal Funding
$99.14MKey Investors
Underscore VCWaters CorporationDigital Science
2021-04-15Series B· $80M
2020-05-01Series A· $11M
2019-10-31Series A· $8M
Leadership Team
Patrick Grady
CEO
Siping Wang
President & CTO
Recent News
2025-12-16
Research & Development World
2025-12-04
Company data provided by crunchbase