Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Summary

Join Freenome, a high-growth biotech company, as an experienced infrastructure engineer to build a cloud-native machine learning platform for a large cancer genomics dataset. You will provide strategic and tactical leadership to your department, partnering with QA to ensure regulatory compliance. Responsibilities include translating business strategy into cross-functional plans, managing departmental performance, and fostering effective communication and collaboration. You will also lead complex infrastructure initiatives, mentor junior engineers, and help shape platform strategy. This role offers the opportunity to do meaningful engineering work that directly saves lives and reports to the Director, Cloud Infrastructure.

Requirements

• B.S. or M.S. in computer science, engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience
• 8+ years of experience designing, building, and supporting cloud infrastructure, including production environments
• Demonstrated expertise in: Operating managed Kubernetes clusters in production environments
• Designing and maintaining cloud networking, IAM, and policy-based access controls
• Architecting secure, compliant infrastructure (e.g., NIST 800-53, 800-171, CIS Benchmarks)
• Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Pulumi, including module design and CI/CD integration
• Experience implementing observability solutions (e.g., metrics, logs, tracing, alerting) to maintain system health and reliability
• Hands-on experience with cloud migration and greenfield cloud architecture, including setting up secure cloud tenants and core infrastructure from the ground up
• Software design and development expertise, especially in Python
• Deep understanding of Linux internals and distributed systems troubleshooting
• Proven ability to support and scale production workloads on cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills

Responsibilities

• Provide direct, strategic and tactical leadership to your department
• Provide leadership in developing new strategies, methodologies, and solutions to improve execution towards department- and company-level objectives
• Partner with our QA Department to ensure the highest level of regulatory compliance with recognized quality best practice
• Translate business segment strategy into cross-functional plans and guide plan execution
• Accountable for the performance and results of your department (Monitoring performance and initiating action to strengthen results)
• Proactively communicate cross-functionally with key stakeholders to adapt as needed through reprioritization and alignment
• Ensure budgets, resourcing and timelines meet company requirements
• Empowers department to take calculated risks and make mistakes as a team but collectively learn from these experiences, ensuring institutional knowledge is retained and applied in the future
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity, using trial and error to thoughtfully iterate towards the best solution balancing time and resource constraints
• Anticipate factors that could cause issues that have departmental or cross-functional impact and formulates preventive strategies
• Proactively requests feedback from others and are open to continuous feedback
• Consistently delivers actionable and timely feedback to people at all levels in a way that strengthens relationships and enables functional initiatives to advance more quickly
• Provide consistent communications to key functional and cross-functional stakeholders on progress and updates
• Guides department in effective communication and collaboration, avoiding triangulation or churn and fostering direct communication
• Adapts communications to audience requirements to optimize understanding and results, adapting to diverse communication styles
• Build and maintain strong, healthy relationships with cross-functional peers
• Provide representation for your department to executive leadership through reporting, presentations and Quarterly Business Review type meetings
• Lead by example, integrate and reinforce our Values and Principles as much as possible
• Coaches and provides guidance to direct reports to foster our Values and Principles across departments
• Recognizes Values and Principles gaps in your department on an ongoing basis and implement solutions and creates opportunities to grow in those areas
• Lead complex infrastructure and platform initiatives from design through delivery, collaborating across engineering and business teams
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers, providing architectural guidance, code reviews, and hands-on support
• Act as a technical lead, helping shape platform strategy for platform infrastructure and SRE
• Help drive team-wide alignment on engineering best practices and long-term architectural direction
• Influence prioritization and planning in partnership with TPMs and engineering managers
• Actively involved in recruitment, attracting and retaining top talent to build high performing teams
• Effectively cascades organizational strategy and contributes to the development of organizational procedures
• Gives direction and organizational clarity in roles and responsibilities to execute on department and company OKRs more effectively

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in biotechnology, bioinformatics, regulated software, or similar field
• Monitoring, alerting, logging, and tracing tools, such as Prometheus, fluentd, or Jaeger
• Data pipelines, such as Kafka, Spark, Airflow, Argo, Beam, or Flink
• Experience in a startup environment
• Experience with software in a regulated environment
• Exposure to big data, especially biological and clinical data
• Experience with Microsoft Azure

Benefits

• Pre-IPO equity
• Cash bonuses
• Full range of medical, financial, and other benefits