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Salary: USD 176,500 - 0 / annual
Vir Biotechnology, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, is seeking an Associate Director, Principal Data Engineer to lead the design and development of scalable data, cloud, software, and AI-enabled research platforms that accelerate scientific discovery, clinical data analysis, and program decision-making.
In this role, you will build the technical foundation for AI-powered research workflows, including AI agents for research insights, quality control/assurance, and scientific/regulatory reporting. You'll partner across Research, Clinical, Data Science, TechOps, Competitive Intelligence, and IT to transform complex scientific data into connected, searchable, and actionable insights.
Key responsibilities include:
- Architecting and building AI-enabled research workflows and agents that help scientists search, analyze, summarize, and connect Vir-generated data
- Developing AI agents for target candidate exploration research insights, experimental QC/QA review, and scientific/regulatory reporting
- Designing trusted LLM, RAG, knowledge-search, and agentic AI workflows with traceability, validation, governance, and human oversight
- Leading development and integration of scientific platforms including bioinformatics and genomics tools
- Building scalable research and clinical data pipelines for bioinformatics, genomics, machine learning, and scientific decision-making
- Architecting and operating AWS cloud infrastructure for AI/ML, bioinformatics, clinical analysis, and large-scale scientific data processing
- Strengthening data quality, metadata, lineage, observability, security, governance, and platform reliability
- Providing senior technical leadership across architecture, engineering practices, mentoring, and roadmap development
You bring 12+ years of experience in data engineering, software engineering, scientific computing, cloud architecture, or related domains. You have strong hands-on expertise with Python and/or Java, AWS cloud infrastructure, and modern data platforms (Databricks, Snowflake, Spark, Airflow, Nextflow). Experience building AI/ML-enabled scientific applications using leading LLMs (GPT, Claude, Gemini) is essential, including RAG, knowledge search, and agentic workflows. You've integrated LIMS, ELN, or experiment-management systems like Experimenta. You understand bioinformatics, genomics, clinical, or healthcare data workflows. You excel at technical leadership, architecture ownership, mentoring, and cross-functional collaboration.
The role reports to the Senior Director of Research and is based in San Francisco with an expectation of three days per week in the office.
