Software Engineer, Storage Platform

Working here could change what you want from a job

If you made a list of all the things your perfect job would have, what would be on it? Would it include a mission that truly justified the word “mission?” Would it involve being part of one of the best scientific research and production labs in the world creating petabytes of insight-rich data? Would it be a place filled with smart people all trying to help you do the best work of your career? Would it have leadership that could see an almost science fiction-like future and was looking to you to get there?

Recursion is the clinical-stage biotechnology company industrializing drug discovery by decoding biology. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset the Recursion Map, a collection of hundreds of billions of searchable inferences across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. 

This company has been purpose-built to do things that have quite literally never been done before. And while we have resources and an amazing lab, the secret sauce is our people. They are the ones who make big bets and deal in orders of magnitude instead of thinking incrementally, and the result is clear: Eight years ago, we were doing plate manufacturing by hand. Today, we are able to process and scan more than a million experiments every week. 

You’ll be joining Recursion at an interesting time, both for the company and for the world. The global pandemic has reinforced in everyone’s mind not only the importance of therapeutics, but also the critical value that accelerating every phase of drug discovery can provide. For most, the notion that “patients can’t wait” is abstract; COVID-19 has made this concept all too real for millions, even billions, worldwide. Every week, you’ll work hand-in-glove with our data and science teams, turning 1.8 million+ weekly automated experiments into a map of human biology. 

It is an audacious goal, but it isn’t a dream or science fiction. We’re already doing it.

The Impact You’ll Make

• Create a world-class object storage platform. You'll work with Data Scientists, Machine Learning Scientists, Biologists, and Automation Scientists in building a platform for generating and storing petabytes of data, iterating quickly on novel analyses, and prototyping new deep learning models
• Set and raise technical standards for both work and mentorship of senior contributors.
• Build relatability into a heterogeneous dataset. At Recursion, we generate datasets based on a wide swath of diverse biological models and treatment approaches. You'll work with Data Scientists to build relatability and queryability into these datasets so they can be used in five years to answer the sorts of questions we haven't even thought of asking yet.
• Act as a mentor, coach, and sponsor. You will share your technical knowledge and experiences, delivering impact, learning, and growth within and beyond the team.

The team you will join

Our object storage platform team is a team of engineers that focus on storage and retrieval for our high dimensional connected biological data, allowing machine learning researchers, data scientists and software engineers to have the data when they need it, where they need it to uncover novel biology. The team works across a broad range of spaces, from helping with data locality in partnership with the team maintaining our supercomputer to creating storage solutions for new biological data types.

You will work on several services, working with RESTful APIs, event streaming, and third-party integrations, building tooling to provide easy and flexible access to over 13 petabytes of data, events for triggering computation or tracking state, and automated visibility into the progress of data pipelines. 

Our Tech Stack

We hope you’re excited about technologies such as Python, Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, BigQuery, Dataflow and PostgreSQL. Our cloud services are provided by Google Cloud Platform. 

The Experience You’ll Need

• Though we don’t have specific targets around the number of years worked, we are looking for people with wide experience to be a leader growing the team
• Experience sharing insights both in the team and across the company
• Connect people across the organization to meet the needs of your team 
• Experience programming in projects with unknowns and technical complexity, spanning multiple systems and involving diverse technologies.
• Experience collaborating with engineers on and off team to complete large projects. 
• A people-first mindset. Despite the deadlines, we always prioritize supporting our coworkers in t