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Director/Senior Director of Data Engineering

South San Francisco, California, United States

About Xaira Therapeutics

Xaira is an innovative biotech startup focused on leveraging AI to transform drug discovery and development. The company is leading the development of generative AI models to design protein and antibody therapeutics, enabling the creation of medicines against historically hard-to-drug molecular targets. It is also developing foundation models for biology and disease to enable better target elucidation and patient stratification. Collectively, these technologies aim to continually enable the identification of novel therapies and to improve success in drug development. Xaira is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and London.

About this Role

Xaira Therapeutics is an integrated biotechnology company driving advances in artificial intelligence to develop therapeutics. Data is critical to our success and as the head of Data Engineering you will build and lead a world-class team responsible for the design, integration, and governance of our scientific data ecosystem. Your work will ensure that critical laboratory and computational data is accessible, reproducible, and actionable—accelerating AI-driven drug discovery. You will provide both strategic leadership and technical oversight, prioritizing robust data governance, pipeline engineering, and seamless data interoperability across scientific teams.

Key Responsibilities:

  • Mentor and lead a high-performing data engineering team, fostering collaboration, technical excellence, and continuous improvement.
  • Serve as a liaison between technical teams, stakeholders, and leadership, leading cross-functional collaborations.
  • Promote and embed best practices in data engineering and governance across the organization, bringing industrial development and engineering practices to biological software development.
  • Oversee design, development, and management of scalable scientific data infrastructure that spans from the lab to cloud-based data infrastructure and analytical applications.
  • Develop data strategy and lead integration efforts with laboratory information management systems (e.g., Benchling), ensuring efficient data capture and automated data accessioning.
  • Develop and lead efforts to convert internally and externally generated data into data repositories for training and validation of AI models
  • Implement and maintain data governance standards, ensuring quality, interoperability, provenance, and accessibility.
  • Support AI, bioinformatics, and computational biology teams by building robust engineering platforms, including those deployed via Nextflow and other workflow systems
  • Establish best practices for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) to ensure reproducibility and consistency.
  • Collaborate closely with stakeholders to translate complex data into clear, actionable insights, including the creation and management of analytical dashboards and interactive applications.

Qualifications:

  • Track record of building and leading bioinformatics engineering, data science, data engineering, or scientific computing teams in a biotech or pharmaceutical setting.
  • Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively in a multidisciplinary setting.
  • Strong oral and written communication skills
  • Experience developing and implementing robust computational pipelines to enable the generation of biological insights. 
  • Experience with large scale data engineering in the life sciences space.
  • Extensive experience in data integration, pipeline engineering, and managing complex scientific data ecosystems, including integrating and managing laboratory data using Benchling or similar systems.
  • Experience with Data lake/data warehouse and metadata tools
  • Experience using GitHub and Docker (or equivalents) for reproducible software development and deployment.
  • Understanding of data governance, reproducibility, and provenance practices.

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Experience with data cataloging, findability, and improving accessibility of information in complex organizations.
  • Knowledge of regulatory compliance and handling of sensitive data.
  • Familiarity with AWS and Terraform for cloud infrastructure management.
  • PhD in bioinformatics, computational biology, computer science, or a related field with 10+ years of relevant experience, or MS with 12+ years of experience.

Compensation

We offer a competitive compensation and benefits package, seeking to provide an open, flexible, and friendly work environment to empower employees and provide them with a platform to develop their long-term careers. A Summary of Benefits is available for all applicants. We offer a competitive package that includes base salary, bonus, and equity. The base pay range for this position is expected to be $227,000 - $295,000 annually; however, the base pay offered may vary depending on the market, job-related knowledge, skills and capabilities, and experience.

Xaira Therapeutics an equal-opportunity employer. We believe that our strength is in our differences. Our goal to build a diverse and inclusive team began on day one, and it will never end.

TO ALL RECRUITMENT AGENCIES: Xaira Therapeutics does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias or employees. Xaira Therapeutics is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.

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