Lead Software Engineer Jobs in San Mateo, CA

Who We Are

TetraScience is the Scientific Data and AI Cloud company. We are catalyzing the Scientific AI revolution by designing and industrializing AI-native scientific data sets, which we bring to life in a growing suite of next gen lab data management solutions, scientific use cases, and AI-enabled outcomes.

TetraScience is the category leader in this vital new market, generating more revenue than all other companies in the aggregate. In the last year alone, the world’s dominant players in compute, cloud, data, and AI infrastructure have converged on TetraScience as the de facto standard, entering into co-innovation and go-to-market partnerships.

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 Role

As a Lead Platform Engineer, you will architect and evolve the shared Platform Core services that every other engineering team builds on designed to absorb 100× growth in data volume and users. You'll own the hard cross-cutting primitives authorization, metadata, governance, and high-throughput event processing and act as the technical design authority / SME across product and engineering.

This is a highly impactful seat for an engineer who has built authorization and governance systems as products (not just consumed them), understands the trade-offs of large-scale distributed design, and thrives on turning ambitious scalability goals into concrete technical strategy.

If you’re excited by the challenge of architecting cloud-native platform to power massive growth and thrive on solving complex scalability problems, we’d love to hear from you.

What You will Do

- Architect and evolve our cloud-native platform and services to support high-throughput, low-latency data processing patterns, customer-facing features, and design platform to meet scalability requirements.
- Design scalable, distributed systems powering complex capabilities such as authentication & authorization, data lifecycle management, metadata management, operational intelligence, and real-time event processing.
- Evolve the authorization service toward modern identity standards and customer-configurable, fine-grained access models that scale without a release for every new role including authorization for non-human identities (service-to-service, AI agents, MCP-based tooling).
- Build systems that capture and enforce structured metadata at ingest and serve it through clean service contracts; understands where platform metadata plumbing ends and the semantic/ontology layer begins, and collaborates well across that boundary.
- Build governance primitives for a regulated environment — compliance-grade audit trail, dataset-level access controls, and approval / eSignature workflows.
- Collaborate with engineering and product teams to deliver infrastructure that supports new services, customer-facing applications, and high-volume data processing workloads.
- Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code (e.g., CloudFormation, AWS CDK) to automate, standardize, and secure deployments to support online upgrades and on-demand infrastructure allocation.
- Enhance observability and monitoring to ensure reliability, cost efficiency, and rapid incident response.

Champion best practices in distributed systems design, scalability, and performance optimization, and share architectural insights through design reviews and technical documentation.

Requirements

- 10+ years of hands-on software engineering, with a proven track record of designing, building, and scaling distributed, cloud-native backend services and platforms in production.
- Demonstrated experience as a technical leader or architect, making key decisions on system design, scalability, performance, and cost optimization.
- Strong proficiency in API-first design, including REST, GraphQL, and OpenAPI specifications designing APIs that are scalable, secure, versioned, and extensible.
- Strong proficiency in TypeScript and Python, with a focus on building highly performant backend services.
- Expertise in AWS cloud services and architecture, including deep experience with core services (e.g., EC2, Lambda, ECS/EKS, IAM, S3) and advanced data and messaging tools such as SQS, Kinesis, Kafka, and EventBridge.
- Expert knowledge of infrastructure-as-code frameworks such as CloudFormation and CDK, CI/CD pipelines, and strong opinions on production deployment strategy across dozens of platforms.
- Solid understanding of observability best practices, including monitoring, alerting, and distributed tracing for SLI/SLO/SLA design.
- Ability to articulate ideas clearly, present findings persuasively, and build rapport with clients and team members.
- Strong collaboration skills and the ability to partner effectively with cross-functional teams.

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