🔎 Organizing the world’s biological information

E9 Genomics is on an urgent mission to organize the world’s biological information for human health. We need a scalable search engine that can harmonize and index all biological data – both structured and unstructured, up to the petabyte scale – to enable every scientist in therapeutic development to make rapid, data-driven decisions about mission-critical questions.

Our founders have nearly two decades of combined experience building pioneering open-source genomic database engines and open data resources that have enabled scientists to search, explore, and interpret the population-scale genomic data at the speed of human reasoning, and that ****work has directly contributed to over 6 million rare disease diagnoses since 2014. We’ve seen firsthand the power and impact of equipping scientists with the tools to reason instantaneously with massive genomic datasets, and we’re now setting out to build that capability for all biological data.

We’re ultimately creating a scientific reasoning engine backed by all the world’s biological data — which we’ll achieve by building a company where the best people are equipped to tackle the hardest technical and operational challenges — for the benefit of humanity.

Why join?

We’re a scrappy and highly collaborative team of people who are changing how science is done by doing the work to put the best versions of ourselves out into the world. Also:

Speed: We’re not encumbered by legacy systems and can iterate quickly. There will be a day when we’ll need more process and investment in stability, but right now we need to move quickly, learn a lot, and sometimes break things (or throw them away).

Variety and growth: You’ll get to work across the technology stack (including systems built on LLMs) on many kinds of scientific problems, learning a ton as we go, and you’ll interact with customers in addition to writing code.

Ownership: You’re not here to chug through tickets somebody else wrote; we want your voice in product and technology decisions.

Impact: Biological data exploration can be instantaneous and frictionless, and our technology will bring lifesaving therapies to market faster.

What you'll do (responsibilities)

We're hiring an experienced generalist IC data engineer in greater Boston, MA to join our small team of motivated builders and quickly expand our software product and data layer, building directly with our CTO.

1. Build the core: Our data strategy includes large-scale structured (multi-omic) and unstructured (scientific publications, clinical reports, clinical trial updates) resources. You’ll build, maintain, and integrate ETL scripts in Python to build up our harmonized resource base across Postgres and S3, and work on implementing or inventing methods to search across diverse biological data and metadata in a loose knowledge graph.
2. Fearlessly tackle ambitious problems: Our mission is to index all of biology, and there’s a lot there. You’ll work with complex datasets of massive scale, using cloud services (AWS), workflow engines, and internal tooling built to leverage large language models to index biology.
3. Collaborate closely: Work directly with our CTO and founding team to shape our technical roadmap. You'll also interact with scientists using our products, understanding their needs to guide feature development.
4. Wear multiple hats: As part of a small, early-stage startup, you'll have the opportunity (and sometimes the need) to work on various aspects of our technology stack, product development, user support, and operations.
5. Build solid foundations: Implement and maintain best practices in software engineering, including version control, CI/CD, code reviews, and secure design principles.
6. Learn and grow, together: Building data systems to index all of biology requires mastering complexity across increasingly-automated ingestion, robust backend data systems, generative AI and mathematical modeling, and biological relationships. We’re going to get there, together — we don't expect you to be an expert in all these areas out of the gate. Learning new skills across data systems and biology is a big part of this job.
7. Make a difference: We’re a small startup, and every team member is critical to our success. Our company culture is going to be defined by the way our early team works together and how we show up for each other, and you will help determine who’s going to join that team as it grows.

What we're looking for (qualifications)