Senior Staff Software Engineer

We are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to join our Platform team at Freenome. As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you will shape the technical direction of our platform, mentor other engineers, and stay hands-on with design, code, and operations. Our Platform Engineering team's goal is to multiply the productivity of domain experts by building shared cloud services, including a governed data lakehouse, batch and distributed compute, and self-service environments for research and analytics.

Responsibilities:

• Shape Platform's technical vision and roadmap, working with engineering and R&D leaders to align platform priorities with company goals.
• Treat Platform and Data as Products, building trust with leads and SMEs from domain teams, and translating shared needs into reusable platform solutions.
• Design and ship scalable platform systems, evolving the architecture through reviews, rapid prototypes, and pragmatic technology choices.
• Drive business-critical initiatives, resolving tradeoffs, sequencing work into incremental deliverables, and delegating to scale execution.
• Support platform users to unblock critical work, troubleshoot complex system issues, and turn recurring issues into lasting reliability and capacity improvements.
• Champion AI adoption across Freenome, pairing with domain experts and tailoring guidance and tools to varied technical backgrounds.
• Expand our team's impact by using AI for platform enhancements, and by building platforms for AI that empower Freenome users to create and deploy secure, cost-effective agentic workflows and LLM-powered applications.
• Increase visibility of cloud costs, recommend and drive initiatives to reduce waste while protecting performance, reliability, and scientific productivity.
• Grow other engineers through pairing, design review, delegation, and feedback, while modeling Freenome's values and reinforcing a high-performing culture.

Requirements:

• 12+ years of relevant software engineering experience or equivalent, preferably in platform teams, delivering complex systems from design to production.
• 3+ years guiding complex initiatives end-to-end across teams: aligning stakeholders, communicating tradeoffs clearly, and enabling delivery without formal authority.
• 3+ years building and operating production platforms using Infrastructure as Code on a public cloud, preferably Azure or GCP.
• Proficiency in Python and at least one other high-level programming language.
• Deep knowledge of Linux internals, networking, and virtualization, with hands-on troubleshooting and performance tuning at system level.
• Solid Kubernetes expertise, with experience owning one or more advanced capabilities such as controllers, operators, and CRDs, admission control, scheduling, autoscaling, service mesh, or multi-cluster networking.
• Sound judgment in distributed systems and platform design, including governance, capacity, reliability, cost, data processing, and storage.
• Software architecture leadership: you ship clean code, write clear design docs and ADRs, and guide constructive reviews and collaborative technical decisions.
• You are a force multiplier who enjoys helping engineers or domain experts grow, with a track record of making teams more capable and independent.
• Success partnering with one or more specialist teams, such as data science, AI/ML, computational biology, or related fields, to improve their workflows.
• Hands-on AI-assisted development and a record of building reusable tools or workflow automation.

Nice to haves:

• Experience, familiarity, or a genuine interest in life-sciences software, NGS pipelines, and biological data.
• ML Ops, model development, and deep learning.
• Scientific Python frameworks and data-science technology stack.
• Workflow orchestration and distributed compute frameworks on Kubernetes.
• Cloud migrations, multi-cloud, or multi-region operations.
• Columnar processing, open lakehouse technologies, and modern table formats such as Apache Iceberg.
• FinOps practices, workload cost attribution, and measurable cloud savings.

Benefits:

• The US target range of our base salary for new hires is $188,275 - $270,375.
• You will also be eligible to receive equity, cash bonuses, and a full range of medical, financial, and other benefits depending on the position offered.