Recursion, a clinical-stage TechBio company, is at the forefront of industrialized, AI-enabled drug discovery and development. We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Staff Engineer to join our team, focusing on critical data engineering initiatives within our late-stage discovery and early clinical phases. This role is pivotal in building robust, scalable, and compliant data pipelines and systems that accelerate our scientific and clinical endeavors.

The ideal candidate will possess a deep understanding of modern data engineering practices, distributed computing frameworks, and the unique challenges of data management in a highly regulated environment. You will be instrumental in designing, implementing, and optimizing data workflows that empower our scientific and clinical teams, ensuring data integrity, accessibility, and regulatory readiness (GxP).

In this role, you will:

Architect and Implement Scalable Data Pipelines: Design, build, and maintain high-performance, fault-tolerant data pipelines for processing large-scale scientific and clinical datasets.
Drive Data Engineering Best Practices: Establish and champion best practices for data modeling, ETL/ELT processes, data quality, and data governance across late-stage discovery and clinical operations.
Enhance Workflow Orchestration: Leverage and extend our existing orchestration platforms (e.g., Camunda, Prefect) to integrate data pipelines seamlessly into end-to-end scientific and clinical workflows, ensuring automation and reliability.
Ensure GxP/GDPR/HIPAA Compliance: Design and implement data systems and processes that adhere to clinical regulations, 21 CFR Part 11, and other relevant industry standards, ensuring data integrity, auditability, and validation readiness.
Collaborate with Cross-Functional Teams: Partner closely with data scientists, clinical operations specialists, and other engineering teams to understand data needs, translate requirements into technical solutions, and ensure successful data delivery.
Optimize Data Performance and Cost: Continuously monitor, analyze, and optimize the performance and cost-efficiency of data processing and storage solutions.
Provide Technical Leadership and Mentorship: Act as a technical leader within the team, providing guidance, mentorship, and code reviews to junior and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of excellence and continuous learning.
Troubleshoot Complex Data Issues: Lead the diagnosis and resolution of complex data-related issues, ensuring minimal disruption to scientific and clinical operations.
Contribute to Strategic Planning: Participate in the strategic planning and roadmap development for data engineering initiatives within the late-stage discovery and clinical domains.

The Team You’ll Join

Our mission is to industrialize and transform the development of medicines by integrating data-driven insights and advanced analytics, throughout the entire development lifecycle. Our team drives technological transformation for preclinical and clinical development, enabling us to deliver programs at scale, faster and with reduced costs – so that we can bring life-saving and life-enhancing treatments to patients and improve outcomes at a pace we can all be proud of.

The Experience You’ll Need

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Minimum of 7+ years of experience in data engineering, with a strong focus on building and managing large-scale data pipelines.
Demonstrated experience with GCS, distributed data processing, and machine learning workflows.
Strong programming skills in Python. R is also a plus.
In-depth understanding of data warehousing, data lakes, and modern data architecture patterns.
Proven experience designing and implementing systems compliant with GxP regulations (e.g., GCP, GLP, GMP), 21 CFR Part 11, and other relevant regulatory frameworks.
Experience with workflow orchestration tools (e.g., Prefect, Camunda, Airflow)
Familiarity with cloud platforms, particularly Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Kubernetes
Excellent problem-solving, analytical, and debugging skills.
Strong communication, collaboration, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced, dynamic environment and manage multiple priorities.

Working Location & Compensation:

This position is based at our office located in New York City/London/SLC. Please note that we are a hybrid environment and ask that employees spend 50% of their time in the office. Relocation support is available for qualifying candidates.

At Recursion, we believe that every employee should be compensated fairly. Based on the skill and level of experience required for this role, the estimated current annual base range for this role is USD: $192,200 - $244,000/GBP £101,900 - £127,600. You will also be eligible for an annual bonus and equity compensation, as well as a comprehensive benefits package.

The Values We Hope You Share:

We act boldly with integrity. We are unconstrained in our thinking, take calculated risks, and push boundaries, but never at the expense of ethics, science, or trust.
We care deeply and engage directly. Caring means holding a deep sense of responsibility and respect - showing up, speaking honestly, and taking action.
We learn actively and adapt rapidly. Progress comes from doing. We experiment, test, and refine, embracing iteration over perfection.
We move with urgency because patients are waiting. Speed isn’t about rushing but about moving the needle every day.
We take ownership and accountability. Through ownership and accountability, we enable trust and autonomy—leaders take accountability for decisive action, and teams own outcomes together.
We are One Recursion. True cross-functional collaboration is about trust, clarity, humility, and impact. Through sharing, we can be greater than the sum of our individual capabilities.

Our values underpin the employee experience at Recursion. They are the character and personality of the company demonstrated through how we communicate, support one another, spend our time, make decisions, and celebrate collectively.

More About Recursion

Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX) is a clinical stage TechBio company leading the space by decoding biology to radically improve lives. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously generate one of the world’s largest proprietary biological and chemical datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. By commanding massive experimental scale — up to millions of wet lab experiments weekly — and massive computational scale — owning and operating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, Recursion is uniting technology, biology and chemistry to advance the future of medicine.

Recursion is headquartered in Salt Lake City, where it is a founding member of BioHive, the Utah life sciences industry collective. Recursion also has offices in Toronto, Montréal, New York, London, Oxford area, and the San Francisco Bay area. Learn more at www.Recursion.com, or connect on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.

Recursion is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, local, or provincial human rights legislation.

Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.