Scientific Data Engineer
Merge Labsabout 3 hours ago
Base Salary
$225k - $260k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, implement, and maintain reusable Python libraries for scientific and image analysis and quality control.
- Build and operate reproducible analysis pipelines integrating with workflow-management and scientific data systems.
- Define data models for raw data, experimental metadata, derived results, and analysis provenance across in vitro and in vivo assays.
- Partner with wet-lab and computational scientists to translate scientific questions into requirements, validated methods, and maintainable software.
- Establish testing, validation, versioning, observability, and failure-handling practices for scientific workflows.
- Evaluate external methods and tools, make build-versus-buy decisions, and define interfaces that support system evolution.
- Balance immediate experimental needs with shared infrastructure investments that improve consistency, interoperability, and research velocity.
Requirements
- Strong software engineering experience in Python, including API design, testing, packaging, code review, and collaborative development with Git.
- Experience designing and implementing image-analysis pipelines for scientific data and selecting, configuring, and validating classical or learned methods.
- Experience building production or research workflows with an orchestration system such as Dagster, Prefect, or Airflow.
- Experience working directly with wet-lab scientists to clarify needs, communicate trade-offs, and develop scientifically valid solutions.
- A rigorous approach to scientific computing, including quantitative validation, quality control, reproducibility, provenance, and explicit failure-mode handling.
- Systems thinking and the ability to balance delivery speed, maintainability, reliability, performance, and cost.
- Ownership and judgment to break ambiguous work into milestones, surface risks early, and independently drive projects to completion.
- Experience with Bazel or another large monorepo build system is helpful but not required.
- Experience with next-generation sequencing, spatial omics, ultrasound, or other scientific data modalities is helpful but not required.
- Experience working in an early-stage or rapidly changing research environment is helpful but not required.
About Merge Labs
Merge Labs is a research lab with the long-term mission of bridging biological and artificial intelligence to maximize human ability, agency and experience. Join us: merge.io/careers