Senior Data Engineer
About this role
Formation Bio faces a development bottleneck where clinical trial costs and timelines limit the number of new medicines reaching patients, and this role solves that problem by building trusted data systems to accelerate drug development. Operating across product engineering, data science, and clinical operations, the senior engineer designs reliable ingestion pipelines, canonical data models, and production data products for both human users and AI agents. Ideal candidates bring deep expertise in regulated biotechnology data and data warehousing to support the company mission of bringing treatments to patients faster.
What you will do
- Design and operate production data systems that ingest clinical, operational, and third-party vendor data into reliable, queryable data products.
- Own shared and canonical data models, data contracts, transformations, orchestration, warehouse models, and downstream interfaces.
- Partner with Product Engineering on application data models, source-system contracts, APIs, events, and data access patterns.
- Partner with Data Science on productionized training datasets, feature pipelines, data interfaces, and ML use cases.
- Turn recurring data cleaning, normalization, and transformation work into versioned, tested, observable, and maintainable production pipelines.
- Establish strong data quality, testing, freshness, completeness, lineage, documentation, and observability practices.
- Own data governance practices for sensitive and regulated data, including access controls, auditability, traceability, and appropriate data handling.
What you need
- 5+ years of relevant data engineering experience building and operating production data systems.
- Experience with pharmaceutical, biology, HIPAA or other regulated data core to BioTech is required.
- Strong Python and SQL skills, with deep experience in data modeling and warehouse systems, especially Snowflake.
- Experience with Dagster as an orchestration system or equivalent transformation tooling such as dbt.
- Experience with data contracts, schema evolution, data quality testing, observability, lineage, and production incident response.
- Experience integrating messy clinical, operational, vendor, or otherwise complex source data.
- Daily fluency with AI tools and the ability to validate generated code, transformations, and data-modeling decisions.
Nice to have
- Experience working within and building validated computerized systems (CSV)
Benefits
- Equity
- Comprehensive benefits
- Generous perks
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the remote work policy for this role?
Formation Bio is prioritizing hiring in key hubs, primarily the New York City and Boston metro areas, with a hybrid model requiring 3 days per week in office. Applicants from the Research Triangle and San Francisco Bay Area may also be considered.
What is the salary range for the Senior Data Engineer position?
The total compensation range is $185,500 to $232,000. Individual compensation is determined by factors such as role scope, geographic location, and skills and experience.
What specific data stack and tools are used on the team?
The tech stack involves Python and SQL with Snowflake for data modeling and warehousing. The team uses Dagster for orchestration, dbt for transformation tooling, alongside Docker, GitHub, and Terraform or OpenTofu.
What kind of data experience is required for applicants?
Candidates need five or more years of relevant data engineering experience building and operating production data systems. Experience with pharmaceutical, biology, HIPAA or other regulated data core to BioTech is required.