Senior Platform Engineer

About Orchestra

Orchestra helps companies navigate the journey from discovery to medicine by connecting science, operations, and finance in an intelligent platform. We're on a mission to make every R&D dollar count.

Developing new medicines is a societal imperative to improve human health and reduce medical costs. Brilliant science needs effective management to develop breakthrough medicines that reach patients. We aim to bring the same level of sophistication to scientific development that modern tools brought to software development. While software teams can ship updates daily, R&D organizations face unique challenges: years long development cycles, complex interdependencies, and high-stakes decisions that can make or break billion dollar programs.

Founded by early Benchling leaders, we just emerged from stealth with $20M in funding from 8VC, Andreessen Horowitz, Insight Partners, Definition, and Haystack to transform how biotech companies operate. Our customers are working on society's most important challenges, including neurodegeneration, cancer, metabolic disease, and biomanufacturing. We're looking for engineers who are excited about building software that helps scientific organizations operate more effectively.

The Role

We're seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to join our growing team in San Francisco. You'll build and maintain the foundational infrastructure that powers Orchestra's intelligent R&D management platform, ensuring our systems can scale reliably as we help more companies bring breakthrough innovations to market.

Challenges You'll Tackle

Mission Critical Infrastructure : Design and maintain the cloud infrastructure that biotech companies depend on for managing billion dollar R&D programs. Build systems that handle sensitive scientific data, complex financial modeling, and AI workloads with the reliability and security these high stakes operations demand.

Scalable AI Operations : Create the platform infrastructure that powers our AI driven signals extraction from meeting transcripts, documents, and operational data. Design systems that can process unstructured data at scale while maintaining performance and cost efficiency as our customer base grows.

Developer Experience : Create tooling and infrastructure that enables our engineering team to ship features rapidly and reliably. Design CI/CD pipelines, monitoring systems, and development environments that help us maintain quality while moving at startup speed.

Security & Compliance : Implement infrastructure that meets the stringent requirements of biotech and pharmaceutical companies. Build towards SOC 2 compliance while maintaining the development velocity needed in a fast-growing startup environment.

What Sets You Apart

Complexity : You understand how to build platform infrastructure for complex, data-intensive applications where reliability directly impacts scientific outcomes. You're excited about the technical challenges of supporting AI workloads, financial modeling, and secure data processing at scale.

Curiosity : You're genuinely curious about how breakthrough products are developed and excited about building infrastructure that helps scientific organizations operate more effectively. You want your platform work to contribute to bringing medicines and other innovations to market.

Agency : You're drawn to environments where you can shape both the technical infrastructure and operational practices. You enjoy the responsibility of building foundational systems that will scale, balancing the speed needed at an early stage company with the reliability required for mission critical software.

Qualifications

Required

5+ years of platform/infrastructure engineering or SRE experience

Strong expertise in cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure) including IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation)

Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability, implementing and running alerting systems and incident response

Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipeline design, implementation and maintenance

Collaborative mindset with proven track record of working effectively in small, fast-moving engineering teams

Preferred

SOC 2 compliance implementation experience: security controls, monitoring, audit preparation

Performance optimization experience for data intensive applications

AI-assisted development proficiency; leveraging tools to accelerate infrastructure work