TetraScience is the Scientific Data and AI company building Tetra OS, the operating system for scientific intelligence. We help the world's leading life sciences firms turn fragmented scientific data into AI-native assets and scientific workflows that accelerate discovery, development, and manufacturing. TetraScience's growing ecosystem of strategic partners includes NVIDIA, Databricks, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Snowflake, Google, and Microsoft.
In connection with your candidacy, you will be asked to carefully review the Tetra Way letter, authored directly by Patrick Grady, our co-founder and CEO. This letter is designed to assist you in better understanding whether TetraScience is the right fit for you from a values and ethos perspective. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this document and you are encouraged to take it literally and reflect on whether you are aligned with our unique approach to company and team building. If you join us, you will be expected to embody its contents each day.
The RoleThe Tetra Apps platform is how scientists, partners, and TetraScience teams build and run containerized applications on Tetra OS. The platform owns except the app itself - packaging and templates, provisioning, routing, identity and authorization boundaries, observability, upgrades, and the developer experience that ties it all together.
We are hiring the Tech Lead for this platform. This is a technical lead-level individual contributor seat, not a people-management role. You will be the technical design authority for the Tetra Apps runtime, own sprint and quarterly planning for the team alongside your product partner, and be accountable for what the team commits to, ships, and and operates in production. You will work with the team who own apps infrastructure today, supporting teams in adjacent areas like DevOps and security, and with the product and field teams whose work runs through the platform.
You will inherit a production platform with business value, tech debt, and future needs. You will keep that system running, make incremental improvements, and steer it toward an architecture that holds for years.
What You Will Do- Own the technical architecture of the Tetra Apps platform: how applications are developed, packaged, provisioned, routed, authenticated, isolated, observed, upgraded, and retired.
- App runtime. Design and evolve the app proxy and routing layer, container provisioning and lifecycle on ECS, per-app identities (service accounts, IAM roles, database credentials), and the install, upgrade, and rollback paths that must work in both multitenant cloud and customer-hosted environments.
- App security. Design security into the platform: tenant and per-user data boundaries; delegated authorization; secrets handling; browser security, and server-side enforcement of approval and install gates. Threat-model a platform that runs external code, including agents.
- App ops. Own production readiness: metrics and tracing for apps, SLIs and SLOs, alerting, incident runbooks, capacity and cost planning. Partner with DevOps and other platform teams on infrastructure-as-code and multi-tenant deployment.
- App developer experience. Own the templates, SDKs (TypeScript and Python), CLI, local development loop, and documentation that builders use. Make the correct, secure path the fast path and vice versa.
- Plan and deliver. Run sprint and quarterly planning with the product manager: scope, estimate, sequence, and hold the line on commitments. Make maintenance and tech-debt paydown visible in the plan and lead ROI discussions.
- Be the design authority. Lead design reviews, write architecture RFCs and decision records, represent the platform in the weekly architecture review, and raise the bar for the engineers around you through review and pairing.
- Stay full stack. Ship code and components across TypeScript/Node.js services, React web apps, AWS architecture, client SDKs, and IAC / CI/CD and automation.
- Support the field directly. Help field engineers and customers build and debug apps in their environments, and turn what you learn into platform improvements.
Requirements
- 10+ years of professional software engineering, including time as the technical lead or architect of a platform that external teams build on.
- Shipped and operated a multi-tenant application platform, app hosting/runtime, PaaS, plugin or extension system, or internal developer platform in production with external users.
- Deep, hands-on container experience: Docker image pipelines, ECS or similar task and service definitions, networking, service discovery, scaling, and cost.
- Security engineering as a first-class skill: IAM and least privilege, identity propagation, tenant isolation, browser security, secret management. You have secured multi-tenant systems for running untrusted code.
- Adapted to the AI step change in software development - you ship faster with fewer bugs and avoid both the “no AI” and “waterfall of slop” pitfalls, and you help your team and builders on your platform do the same
- The judgment to successfully apply AI to production software generation while maintaining correctness, security, and architectural fit.
- Strong production experience with AWS: ECS, ALB/NLB, VPC, IAM, KMS, CloudWatch, S3, Lambda. Infrastructure-as-code with CloudFormation or an equivalent.
- Full-stack fluency: expert TypeScript/Node.js for backend services and APIs; solid React, ideally with module federation or micro-frontend experience; working Python for SDKs and tooling.
- Demonstrated API-first design: REST and OpenAPI, versioning, backward compatibility, and clear error contracts.
- Observability skills: OpenTelemetry, SLI/SLO definition, distributed tracing.
- Run sprint and quarterly planning for a team, written design docs and migration plans that got followed, and held engineers to commitments through both influence and authority.
- Operated, extended and improved messy, live production systems without breaking existing customers
- Module federation or micro-frontend architectures and app shells.
- Artifact registries and package management: publishing, versioning, promotion.
- Regulated or validated environments (GxP, 21 CFR Part 11, SOC 2) and audit readiness.
- Operating software in both vendor-hosted (multi-tenant) and customer-hosted (single-tenant) deployments.
- Are primarily a manager. This is a hands-on staff IC seat; your leverage will be technical and by example. As Tetra grows, there are opportunities here.
- Have a background in only infrastructure without application-layer and product judgment, or application-level development with infrastructure and security handled elsewhere. As platform builders we need both.
- Are looking for a greenfield project. This platform is live in production and has proven its value. Change has to be made safely and the lights kept on.
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
- A culture of continuous improvement where you can grow your career and get coaching
The salary range for this position is $200K–$270K USD. The salary range posted reflects our target baseline for this role. Final compensation is determined by a thorough evaluation of factors including the candidate's specific experience, localized market data, and internal team equity.
We are not currently providing visa sponsorship for this position.
Skills Required
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Experience serving as technical lead or architect for a platform used by external teams
- Production experience shipping and operating a multi-tenant application platform, app hosting/runtime, PaaS, plugin system, extension system, or internal developer platform with external users
- Deep hands-on container experience, including Docker image pipelines, ECS or similar task and service definitions, networking, service discovery, scaling, and cost management
- Security engineering experience with IAM, least privilege, identity propagation, tenant isolation, browser security, secret management, and systems running untrusted code
- Experience applying AI to production software development while maintaining correctness, security, and architectural fit
- Strong production AWS experience with ECS, ALB/NLB, VPC, IAM, KMS, CloudWatch, S3, and Lambda
- Infrastructure-as-code experience with CloudFormation or an equivalent
- Expert TypeScript and Node.js experience for backend services and APIs
- Solid React experience, ideally including module federation or micro-frontends
- Working Python experience for SDKs and tooling
- API-first design experience with REST, OpenAPI, versioning, backward compatibility, and clear error contracts
- Observability experience with OpenTelemetry, SLI/SLO definition, and distributed tracing
- Experience running sprint and quarterly planning, writing design documents and migration plans, and holding engineers accountable through influence and authority
- Experience operating, extending, and improving live production systems without disrupting existing customers
- Module federation or micro-frontend architecture and app shell experience
- Artifact registry and package management experience, including publishing, versioning, and promotion
- Experience with regulated or validated environments such as GxP, 21 CFR Part 11, or SOC 2
- Experience operating software in both vendor-hosted multi-tenant and customer-hosted single-tenant deployments
What We Do
Biopharma R&D runs on data trapped in silos. Every instrument, ELN, and LIMS writes results in its own format, so most of what a scientist learns in one experiment never reaches the next. That's a big reason drug development costs keep climbing even as computing power gets cheaper. TetraScience builds Tetra OS, the operating system for scientific intelligence. It sits above and alongside a company's existing instruments, ELNs, and LIMS, works across any vendor, and turns raw scientific data into structured, AI-ready intelligence. Four components make it work. The Scientific Data Foundry ingests data from any source and converts it into governed, machine-readable data at scale. The Scientific Use Case Factory turns one-off workflows into reusable, validated ones deployed across sites. Tetra AI reasons and orchestrates on top of that foundation, grounded in real data instead of guessing. Sciborg teams, our embedded scientist-engineers, work inside customer organizations to get all of it adopted, not just installed. These parts compound. Better data makes workflows faster to build. Workflows generate better data. The result is intelligence that gets more valuable with use instead of resetting on every new project. Customers include Takeda, Bayer, Regeneron, Roche and and AstraZeneca, alongside partners like NVIDIA, Databricks, and Thermo Fisher Scientific. One top-20 pharma customer connected over 1,000 instruments, processed a petabyte of data in a year, and cut 20,000 hours of administrative work. Founded by Patrick Grady and Spin Wang, headquartered in Boston with a European base in Basel. Mission: radically improve and extend human life.
Why Work With Us
We're building the operating system underneath scientific R&D, not another point tool. Work touches real drug development at Takeda, Bayer, and Novartis. Every employee sees the same financials the board sees. We hire people who reason from first principles and run at hard problems.
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