Scientific Data Engineer
Merge Labs8 days ago
Base Salary
$185k - $225k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, implement, and maintain reusable Python libraries for scientific and image analysis and quality control.
- Build and operate reproducible analysis pipelines integrated 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 research 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 evolvable system interfaces.
- Balance immediate experimental needs with shared infrastructure investments that improve consistency, interoperability, and research velocity.
Requirements
- Strong Python software engineering experience, including API design, testing, packaging, code review, and collaborative development with Git.
- Experience designing and implementing scientific image-analysis pipelines and selecting, configuring, and validating classical or learned methods.
- Experience with quantitative validation, quality control, reproducibility, provenance, and explicit failure-mode handling in scientific computing.
- 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.
- Ability to distinguish assay-specific requirements from reusable infrastructure and balance delivery speed, maintainability, reliability, performance, and cost.
- Ability to break ambiguous work into milestones, surface risks early, and independently drive important projects to completion.
- Helpful experience includes Bazel or another large monorepo build system, next-generation sequencing, spatial omics, ultrasound, or other scientific data modalities.
- Experience in an early-stage or rapidly changing research environment is helpful but not required.
About Merge Labs
Merge Labs is a privately held research lab developing high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces that integrate with advanced AI to augment human capability. It builds experimental platforms and automated pipelines across molecular engineering, synthetic biology, neuroscience, advanced microscopy, sequencing, and mammalian cell culture to accelerate BCI R&D. Founded in 2025, the company focuses on safe, accessible neurotechnology rather than commercial products today.