Company
Cortex BioSciences
Annual salary
$220k – $300k/yr
Location
San Francisco, CA
Listed
12d ago
- Experience:
- 3 to 8 years
- Workplace:
- 100% in-person at the Cortex BioSciences office in Jackson Square, San Francisco, CA, 5 days per week. No remote or hybrid flexibility. Occasional travel (<10%) for on-premises customer deployments. Relocation support up to $15,000 covering travel, shipping of household goods, and temporary housing for up to 60 days.
- Equity:
- 1%, 2% of fully diluted capitalization at the time of grant, vesting over four years with a one-year cliff. The company is pre-seed (raised $1.1M) with a planned $8, 10M round in October 2026. Candidates who join before the raise will receive equity at the current, lower valuation. Even candidates offered at the top of the base salary range ($300K) will receive a minimum of 1% equity.
On-site in San Francisco, CA.
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What you'll do
- Own the architectural vision, execution, security posture, and scaling of CORTEX's foundational data and execution layer, our core platform that transforms scattered laboratory data into a unified, queryable knowledge base for scientists and AI agents.
- Design, build, and maintain production data ingestion pipelines, APIs, microservices, and storage layers that normalize heterogeneous scientific inputs into a structured knowledge graph while preserving strict provenance.
- Manage production knowledge graphs (TypeDB/TypeQL) and vector search engines (Qdrant), enabling hybrid symbolic-and-semantic retrieval for agentic workloads.
- Architect high-concurrency platform services in Go alongside Python APIs, managing controlled agent write boundaries and isolated execution environments.
- Design security boundaries into the platform from first principles, including service-to-service authentication, tenant isolation, secrets management, encryption, and zero-trust principles, and own the technical security roadmap.
- Own cloud infrastructure (Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible), CI/CD automation (GitHub Actions), observability (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus), and establish SLOs and internal developer "Golden Paths."
- Set the technical bar for the engineering team, establish architectural patterns, conduct code reviews, mentor engineers, and help build and lead the platform engineering team over time.
- Partner with founders to shape the engineering team, interview candidates, and recruit platform engineers as the company scales post-fundraise.
What you need
- We need someone with 5+ years of experience (3+ for exceptional candidates) building and operating production backend infrastructure, data platforms, or distributed systems who can serve as our senior engineering anchor. You should be comfortable owning architectural vision, system design, security posture, and scaling of a foundational data platform, and have a track record of professionalizing early-stage infrastructure and instilling engineering rigor. Bonus points if you have a background in computational biology, biotech data systems, or experience guiding systems through SOC 2 or similar compliance frameworks.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I apply for the Lead Platform Engineer (US) role at Cortex BioSciences? +
Use the Apply for a referral button on this page to send us your LinkedIn and CV. If your experience fits, we'll introduce you to the recruiter filling this role. They'll email you to check you're interested, then put you forward for this job or others that suit you better. It's free.
What does this Cortex BioSciences role pay? +
The listing gives $220k – $300k/yr.
Is this role remote? +
The listing gives the location as San Francisco, CA. 100% in-person at the Cortex BioSciences office in Jackson Square, San Francisco, CA, 5 days per week. No remote or hybrid flexibility. Occasional travel (<10%) for on-premises customer deployments. Relocation support up to $15,000 covering travel, shipping of household goods, and temporary housing for up to 60 days.
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