Associate Director, Data Engineering

About the role

Relation is a TechBio company developing transformational medicines and scaling rapidly. The Associate Director, Data Engineering will lead the newly established Data Platform team, defining strategy and scaling data processing infrastructure to support ambitious scientific research.

Key responsibilities

• Define and evolve Relation’s unified data platform strategy in partnership with labs, engineering, data science and machine‑learning teams.
• Treat the data platform as a product, ensuring reliability for engineers and scientists.
• Lead, hire and develop a high‑performing team of Data Engineers.
• Manage end‑to‑end data flow from lab instruments to information processing systems.
• Optimize scientific compute pipelines using Nextflow and Seqera Platform for scalability and reproducibility.
• Enforce FAIR data governance standards with automated lineage and provenance.
• Drive operational excellence through robust CI/CD, testing frameworks for ETLs and production‑grade SDKs.
• Own the data infrastructure security posture.

Required profile

• Background in bioinformatics or data engineering with experience in high‑performing interdisciplinary teams.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), Kubernetes and orchestration frameworks such as Nextflow and Dagster.
• Advanced programming skills in Python or Rust and a track record of shipping scalable, well‑tested code.
• Strong cross‑functional coordination bridging wet‑lab, computational science and core engineering.
• Good understanding of data governance frameworks and FAIR principles.
• Knowledge of software engineering best practices and product thinking for data/platform services.

Required skills

• Python
• Rust
• AWS, GCP, Azure
• Kubernetes
• Nextflow
• Dagster
• Seqera Platform
• CI/CD pipelines