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Salary: USD 185,500 - 232,000 / annual
Formation Bio is a tech and AI-driven pharma company founded in 2016 (originally TrialSpark Inc.) that accelerates drug development and clinical trials through advanced technology platforms. The company recognizes that AI and drug discovery are creating more candidate drugs than the industry can progress through traditional means due to high costs and long timelines. Formation Bio partners with pharma companies, research organizations, and biotechs to develop programs past clinical proof of concept, ultimately bringing new medicines to patients faster and more efficiently. The company is backed by leading investors including a16z, Sequoia, Sanofi, Thrive Capital, John Doerr, and Spark Capital.
As a Senior Software Engineer, you will build high-leverage software across the organization, turning ambiguous problems into products and systems that help people, applications, AI-enabled employees, and agents make better decisions and move faster. This is an AI-native engineering role where you use modern AI and agentic development tools as a core part of how you explore, build, test, and operate software. You will also help create software that incorporates AI responsibly, with appropriate interfaces, data access, evaluation, and operational controls.
Key responsibilities include: owning meaningful product or platform outcomes from problem definition through design, implementation, launch, and iteration; building and operating production services, APIs, integrations, databases, asynchronous workflows, and distributed systems; designing and shipping AI-enabled and agentic workflows with tool use, retrieval, data access, and evaluation; using LLMs and agentic coding systems daily for exploration, prototyping, implementation, testing, and debugging; partnering with Data Engineering on data models and access patterns; collaborating with Data Science on ML-powered capabilities; working with SRE on deployment and reliability; making pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, quality, and maintainability; reprioritizing quickly as information changes; and mentoring engineers while raising the bar for product judgment and engineering quality.
The role has a backend and systems center of gravity with value placed on full-stack range. You will be expected to make progress with incomplete information, identify the highest-value path forward, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and reorient quickly when priorities shift.
**Requirements:**
- 5+ years of experience building and shipping production software, or equivalent senior-level experience
- Strong backend and systems engineering fundamentals, including APIs, distributed systems, databases, cloud services, and asynchronous workflows
- Daily experience using AI tools, LLMs, or agentic development systems as part of the engineering workflow
- Experience operating production software with appropriate testing, observability, security, and follow-through after launch
- Strong product judgment and ability to make progress with incomplete information, identify high-value problems, and adapt quickly
- Exceptional communication and collaboration skills across Product Engineering, Data Engineering, Data Science, SRE, and non-technical partners
- Experience in pharmaceutical, biology, and/or biotechnology software and data is a strong plus
- Experience building AI-enabled software, agentic workflows, retrieval systems, tool integrations, or other ML-powered products is a strong plus
- Familiarity with ML concepts such as training versus inference, embeddings, retrieval, evaluation, data quality, and model limitations is a plus
- Full-stack range valued, with primary emphasis on backend, systems, product, and AI engineering
