Head of Platform Engineering

Job description

Seqera exists to advance science for everyone through software We provide software for scientists solving today's most complex and important challenges from pioneering innovative therapeutics to unveiling the secrets of our universe. The journey began a decade ago with Nextflow http://nextflow.io/ — open software that helps over 100,000 global scientists analyze and process data, with more power and flexibility than ever before. Today, Seqera consolidates fragmented data and diverse computing resources into a unified platform. Our modern biotech stack is trusted by over 150 leading life sciences organizations. Empowered with modern software engineering, organizations conduct science faster, on larger datasets, and with more confidence. Seqera accelerates discoveries in an open world. Would you like to be a part of a company with a bigger purpose and make it successful with your own ideas? If yes, keep reading! ABOUT SEQERA Seqera is on a mission to empower scientists and organizations to solve humanity’s biggest challenges through data-driven science. As the company behind Nextflow and the Seqera Platform, we enable global enterprises, biotech innovators, academic institutions, and public sector organizations to scale complex data workflows with confidence. We’re a global, remote-friendly team with headquarters in Barcelona and colleagues across the US, UK, and beyond. As we continue to grow, we’re strengthening our internal foundations - and that’s where you come in. ABOUT THE ROLE We are seeking a leader for our Platform Infrastructure team. This role owns infrastructure at Seqera in both directions: the internal platform our engineers build on, and the infrastructure we ship to customers. A large share of our customers experience Seqera through the infrastructure your team produces, which means much of this work is a product surface held to a product's quality bar. You will lead a team of DevOps and security engineers, and you will be a key member in our architecture review process, where infrastructure, security, and operability are weighed at design time alongside every other significant technical decision. This is a leadership role for someone who wants to define how a growing engineering organization builds, ships, and operates. You will report to the CTO. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own the reliability, security, and cost-effectiveness of our cloud infrastructure, and the ongoing health of the platform - what gets maintained, upgraded, and retired, not only what gets built. - Lead the technical launch of our dedicated single-tenant hosting offering: tenancy and isolation model, provisioning, upgrade and patching strategy across many customer instances, operational tooling, and the per-tenant cost model it will be priced against. - Own our Helm charts and Terraform provider as products - versioned, documented, and tested against supported deployment topologies, with the compatibility obligations that customer-deployed infrastructure carries. - Own CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and the supported path from empty repo to production, so that teams get pipelines, deployment standards, and observability defaults without assembling them each time. - Make cloud cost an engineering discipline: attribution by team and by tenant, anomaly alerting, an efficiency backlog with quantified savings, and cost as an input at design time rather than a surprise after the fact. - Lead our security posture in practice - security architecture applied during design review, and the security story we present to enterprise and life-sciences customers. - Own our formal incident response: severity definitions, an incident commander rotation, runbooks for our top failure modes, and blameless postmortems that change something. - Define what production-ready means at Seqera - tests, observability, documentation, runbooks - and hold the bar consistently across teams. - Grow and develop the Platform Infrastructure team, including active hiring at the senior engineer level and active mentorship and career planning for the whole team. - Partner with engineering, product, and customer-facing teams to bring infrastructure expertise into decisions early. ABOUT YOU - You have led infrastructure, platform, or SRE teams with direct accountability for production reliability, and you are still close enough to the work to review it, set the standard, and make architectural calls yourself. - You have deep Kubernetes, Helm, and Terraform experience in enterprise settings, and strong opinions about infrastructure-as-code earned from operating it. - You have shipped infrastructure that customers deploy and run themselves. You know that charts and modules used by people you will never meet is a different discipline from internal IaC - versioning, backward compatibility, upgrade paths, and support all become your problem. - You have real security depth. You can lead a security architecture conversation rather than coordinate one. - You treat cloud cost as an engineering responsibility, and you can build cost models that stand up to commercial scrutiny. - You have built incident response rather than just carried the pager, and you have handled complex incidents including those involving customer infrastructure. - You are comfortable as a technical peer with senior engineers who will challenge you, and equally comfortable presenting to leadership and customers. - You write things down. We are moving deliberately from knowledge held by individuals to standards that are explicit, teachable, and enforceable. - You are comfortable with ambiguity, and you would rather define a platform than operate one that already exists. NICE TO HAVE: - Experience with single-tenant, dedicated, or customer-isolated deployment models - fleet provisioning, upgrade orchestration across many instances, isolation guarantees. - Developer productivity or internal developer platform experience. - Scientific, research, or high-performance computing environments; large-scale batch and data-intensive workloads. - Experience with multiple cloud providers. - Release engineering experience. - Open-source community exposure - much of what we build is used in the open. - Familiarity with compliance frameworks relevant to enterprise life-sciences customers. GREAT BENEFITS - Time off: 23 days for vacations per year, 3 days given by Seqera in December, and the national/public holidays according to your location. - Equity - Private health insurance - Private life insurance - Home office allowance (valued over 1,000 USD) - Subscription to Oliva, Mental Health App - Learning and development budget per year (1,000 USD)