About us

Discover your dog more than fur deep with the most comprehensive DNA test on the market. Designed by world leaders in dog genetics, in partnership with Cornell University, the Embark DNA Test tells owners what breeds make up their pets, how to prevent future possible health problems, and what features and traits their pet might have. Help us end preventable disease in dogs and improve the lives of pets and their people through genomics.

Embark is the only dog DNA test using a research-grade DNA microarray, letting us give our customers the most accurate and comprehensive results on the market. More importantly, it allows us to do ongoing research into the genetics of dogs, which are a fantastic population for genetic discovery due to selective breeding over time. Our research focuses on mapping new traits and diseases, improving personalized veterinary medicine, and developing new breeding programs to eliminate preventable diseases in pets.

Interested in joining? We’re looking for highly motivated and driven employees who will help us stay on the cutting edge of creativity and innovation in the fast-growing consumer genetics space.

The Role

This Staff Engineer role will provide the technical leadership for Embark’s bioinformatics platform. This platform transforms raw genetic data into a dog’s breed mix and ancestry, health and traits results, doggy relatives, and more. It must run efficiently, reliably, and at a massive scale on AWS. You will be the key contributor to the next generation of Embark’s technology to support our fast growth.

Responsibilities

• Lead development of the bioinformatics platform.


• Help build a team and cultivate innovation by driving cross-collaboration and execution of projects across multiple teams through your engineering skills.


• Regularly innovate and re-architect the platform as we reach scaling milestones.


• Design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, operate, and improve the software.


• Mentor and train other team members on writing maintainable systems.


• Collaborate closely with our Scientific and Product teams as they develop improvements to the algorithms and new product features.


• Provide key input to influence strategic improvements to quality, security, and performance.


• Lead the definition and improvement of our internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale data platform. Maintain and advocate for these standards through code review.


• Actively seek out the most challenging impediments to our efficiency as a team ("technical debt"), propose and implement solutions that will enable the entire team to iterate faster

What success looks like

• A fast, reliable, and efficient system that successfully scales with the company’s growth


• Highly engaged team members


• Successfully develop technical skills of peers and mentees


• Successfully, consistently, and reliably ship improvements through individual contributions, cross-team collaboration, and forming well-defined tasks for other software engineers to deliver.

Ideal Candidate

• At least a Bachelors in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience


• Expertise in designing, building, testing, maintaining, and operating large-scale distributed data systems
  
  
  
  • Experience with systems in genetics/bioinformatics or a related field is preferred but not required
  
  
  
  


• Deep knowledge of building large, type-annotated analytics codebases in Python


• Knowledge of architectural patterns and experience making architectural decisions


• Experience profiling and optimizing local and distributed systems


• Expertise with optimizing systems that use AWS technologies including EC2, ASG, S3, SQS, CloudWatch, EKS, RDS, Lambda


• Experience working in a fast-paced and flexible start-up environment


• Strong people leadership skills and project leadership skills as well as strong technical leadership skills


• Ability to lead and develop an effective and happy engineering team 


• Excellent communication skills, both written (design docs, RFCs, system documentation, user guides, PowerPoint management reports, etc) and verbal (leading and facilitating effective meetings, training, pair programming, etc)


• Passion for dogs and genetics


• Interest in staying up to date with the latest technologies, architectures, and management skills

What We Offer

• Dog-friendly office near South Station, Boston


• Perks tailored for dog lovers including subsidized dog-walking services and paw-ternity leave


• Startup perks with big-company benefits


• Competitive salaries, all-inclusive health care, and equity participation


• A flexible vacation policy along with paid maternal and paternal leave


• Fully-stocked office snack bar and regular office events


• New iMacs and MacBook Pros, or laptops running Linux


• Continuing education including attending conferences

Embark is an equal opportunity workplace and values diversity at our company. We are committed to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, citizenship status, sexual orientation, age, disability status, marital status, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other characteristics protected by federal, state or local laws. See also EEO is the Law.