Lead Platform Engineer - Search Platform

TetraScience is seeking a Lead Platform Engineer to help expand their scientific search platform beyond traditional keyword search and unlock new capabilities in chemical search, semantic search, and natural language search. The successful candidate will work at the intersection of AI/ML, cheminformatics, knowledge representation, and distributed systems, enabling scientists to retrieve and reason over complex experimental datasets, chemical entities, assay results, and unstructured lab documents.

Requirements

• 10+ years of backend or platform engineering experience building distributed, production grade systems.
• Hands-on experience with search technologies such as Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Lucene, or vector databases.
• Strong understanding of semantic search concepts embeddings, transformers, similarity scoring, ranking logic, relevance tuning, hybrid retrieval.
• Expert-level coding skills in TypeScript and Python building robust APIs and backend services.
• Experience building and operating microservices or search infrastructure on cloud platforms (AWS preferred), including containerization, CI/CD, observability, and performance tuning.
• Familiarity with scientific or unstructured data processing, such as documents, tables, analytical results, or experimental datasets.
• Strong problem solving skills, with the ability to navigate ambiguous scientific workflows and translate them into engineered systems.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills comfortable working alongside scientists, AI researchers, and product teams.
• Exposure to NLP, LLMs, embedding generation, or retrieval-augmented workflows.
• Experience with large-scale data platforms such as Databricks, Lakehouse architectures, or distributed indexing systems.

Benefits

• 100% employer-paid benefits for all eligible employees and immediate family members
• Unlimited paid time off (PTO)
• 401K
• Flexible working arrangements - Remote work
• Company paid Life Insurance, LTD/STD