Associate Director, Data Engineering

Formation Bio is a tech and AI driven pharma company differentiated by radically more efficient drug development.

Advancements in AI and drug discovery are creating more candidate drugs than the industry can progress because of the high cost and time of clinical trials. Recognizing that this development bottleneck may ultimately limit the number of new medicines that can reach patients, Formation Bio, founded in 2016 as TrialSpark Inc., has built technology platforms, processes, and capabilities to accelerate all aspects of drug development and clinical trials. Formation Bio partners, acquires, or in-licenses drugs from pharma companies, research organizations, and biotechs to develop programs past clinical proof of concept and beyond, ultimately helping to bring new medicines to patients. The company is backed by investors across pharma and tech, including a16z, Sequoia, Sanofi, Thrive Capital, John Doerr, Spark Capital, SV Angel Growth, and others.

• Our Vision for AI in Pharma

• Our Current Drug Portfolio

• Our Technology & Platform

At Formation Bio, our values are the driving force behind our mission to revolutionize the pharma industry. Every team and individual at the company shares these same values, and every team and individual plays a key part in our mission to bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently.

Every decision at Formation Bio, from which drug asset to pursue to how a trial is run, is only as good as the data underneath it. As the Associate Director of Data Engineering, you'll lead the team responsible for that data platform, and this role is about multiplying their impact: you're accountable for the pipelines, warehouse, and data products they build, for how fast and how well they build them, and for creating the conditions in which the engineers who build and operate them can grow, perform at a high level, and sustain that performance over time.

This is an AI-native engineering organization, and for this team that means building the data platform itself in an AI-native way. We expect you and your team to be fluent, fast, and always pushing the edge of what modern AI tools, including agentic coding systems, can do as a core part of how the team builds pipelines, models data, investigates data quality issues, and improves engineering workflows. You should coach your team to treat AI as a permanent force multiplier, not a novelty, while instilling the judgment needed to validate its output and operate trustworthy data systems, especially where clinical and regulated data are involved.

In this role, you will lead a team of data engineers and evolve an established data platform for Formation Bio's next stage of growth. You will clarify ownership, separate concerns where needed, strengthen reliability and governance, and increase the speed at which trusted data supports clinical operations, asset evaluation, and company decision-making. Partnering closely with Data Science, Analytics, Clinical Operations, Biostatistics, and Business Development, you will set technical direction and priorities, unblock your team, represent data engineering needs in cross-functional planning, and promote a culture of trusted, well-governed data throughout the company.

This position is ideal for a manager who leads from the front: someone who is passionate about developing engineers, sets a high bar for pace and rigor, and builds a team that makes it easy and fast for the rest of the company to find, trust, and use data. Your experience with engineering