Senior Backend Engineer
Orchestra.bioOrchestra.bio is a
San Francisco, United StatesSenior
Software Engineering
About the role
TL;DR
Senior Backend Engineer to build complex R&D management platform.
- •About Orchestra Orchestra helps companies navigate the journey from discovery to medicine by connecting science, operations, and finance in an intelligent platform.
- •We're on a mission to make every R&D dollar count.
- •Developing new medicines is a societal imperative to improve human health and reduce medical costs.
- •Brilliant science needs effective management to develop breakthrough medicines that reach patients.
- •We aim to bring the same level of sophistication to scientific development that modern tools brought to software development.
- •While software teams can ship updates daily, R&D organizations face unique challenges: years long development cycles, complex interdependencies, and high-stakes decisions that can make or break billion dollar programs.
- •Founded by early Benchling leaders, we just emerged from stealth with $20M in funding from 8VC, Andreessen Horowitz, Insight Partners, Definition, and Haystack to transform how biotech companies operate.
- •Our customers are working on society's most important challenges, including neurodegeneration, cancer, metabolic disease, and biomanufacturing.
- •We're looking for engineers who are excited about building software that helps scientific organizations operate more effectively.
- •The Role We're seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join our growing team in San Francisco.
- •You'll work with our team to create complex but intuitive products to manage R&D.
- •Challenges You'll Tackle Complex Decision Making: Build interactive tools that help organizations model different paths to market for their discoveries, assessing complex trade offs between time, money, and technical risk.
- •Our users need to understand how decisions today affect their programs years into the future.
- •Organizational Alignment: Create intuitive interfaces that help diverse teams (scientists, program managers, executives) understand how their work connects to broader company goals.
- •This includes designing clear ways to visualize complex dependencies and communicate progress across teams.
- •Scientific Operations: Design interfaces that scientists and researchers use daily to manage their studies, track progress, and coordinate with their teams.
- •This requires crafting experiences that empower rather than get in the way of work.
- •AI Powered R&D Management: Leverage LLMs to help teams generate and evaluate scenarios, infer scientific progress and risks from unstructured data, and surface critical insights from across their R&D portfolio.
- •What Sets You Apart Complexity: You understand how to build backends for complex, interconnected systems where changes in one area cascade across multiple dimensions.
- •You're excited about creating infrastructure that handles the unique challenges of long term, high stakes R&D programs.
- •Agency: You're drawn to environments where you can shape both the technical architecture and product direction.
- •You enjoy the responsibility of building foundational systems that will scale, balancing the speed needed at an early stage company with the craftsmanship required for complex, mission critical software.
- •Curiosity: You're genuinely curious about how breakthrough products are developed and excited about building software that helps scientific organizations operate more effectively.
- •You want your technical work to contribute to bringing medicines and other innovations to market.
- •Qualifications Required 6-8 years of backend development experience with production systems at scale Deep expertise in Typescript, NestJS, PostgreSQL Track record of building complex, scalable, reliable cloud-based software Experience with cloud platform (AWS/Azure/GCP) and containerization Strong experience in data modeling and API design Collaborative mindset with proven track record of working effectively in small, fast-moving engineering teams Preferred AI/ML integration with OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar LLM providers Prompt engineering and RAG implementation experience Full-stack capabilities
- •can contribute to frontend when needed (React/TypeScript) Track record of mentoring other engineers
Required skills
TypeScriptNestJSPostgreSQLAWSAzureGoogle CloudDocker
Nice-to-have skills
OpenAI APIAnthropic APIReact
Domain expertise
biotechdeeptech
Tech stack
TypeScriptNestJSPostgreSQLAWSAzureGoogle CloudDockerReactOpenAI APIAnthropic API
