The posting
Vice President, Software Engineering — Seven Bridges
Location: Remote. US preferred. India or EMEA candidates considered.
Reports to: Chief Technology Officer
Who are we?
Velsera is the precision engine company. We build the software researchers, scientists, and clinicians use to drive precision R&D and bring analytics closer to the point of care. Seven Bridges, Pierian, and UgenTec came together to form Velsera; we are headquartered in Boston, MA, with [current headcount] colleagues across [current country count] countries.
The Seven Bridges Platform is our research genomics platform — roughly 130 containerized services, multi-cloud, running in commercial and FedRAMP Moderate environments, where scientists run CWL, WDL, and Nextflow workflows over petabyte-scale genomic data. Current priorities are federated data management, compliance as a product capability, and governed AI.
Reporting line and scope
You report to the CTO and own engineering for the Seven Bridges Platform: architecture, delivery, and production operations, including reliability, cost, technical debt, and observability. The team is primarily in India, with a smaller group in Serbia; you lead across both sites and work daily with stakeholders in other time zones. You hold architecture authority for the platform, co-own boundary decisions with security, federal compliance, and quality leadership, and partner with a cross-business AI Engineering team.
The role is roughly 40% hands-on technical work and 60% people leadership and organizational delivery. Hands-on means owning architecture decisions of record, leading design reviews, reviewing code and infrastructure changes, and prototyping where needed. You should be credible to your most senior engineers, with a clear view of what this class of platform should become and the ability to take a team and a business there.
What will you do?
- Own the technical vision for the platform over the next three years, and turn it into an architecture and roadmap the team and the business believe in.
- Own architecture decisions of record, design reviews, multi-tenant isolation, and complexity reduction across the service estate.
- Keep delivery governed and modern: infrastructure-as-code under CI with policy-as-code, short-lived credentials, progressive rollout, and change evidence that holds up to audit in a federally authorized environment.
- Own reliability: SLOs and error budgets on the paths customers depend on, on-call design that works across two sites, and turning repeat incidents into architectural change.
- Ship governed AI in the product and apply AI to how the team builds, both under a governance policy co-owned with Risk & Compliance, and both measured.
- Build the team: management depth you can trust with delivery, the specialist skills the roadmap needs, and maintaining a thriving team through a period of growth.
Requirements
What do you bring to the table?
Must have
- 12+ years in software engineering, including several years leading multi-team organizations through managers.
- Distributed-systems and platform architecture ownership at scale — multi-tenant isolation, service decomposition, and the judgment to reduce complexity.
- Domain depth in scientific or biomedical data platforms — genomics, bioinformatics, life sciences, or comparable data-intensive, workflow-driven scientific computing.
- Delivery inside a regulatory boundary such as FedRAMP, HIPAA, ISO 13485, or GxP.
- Reliability and modern delivery engineering: SLOs, error budgets, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD with policy-as-code and progressive rollout.
- Production AI/LLM capability shipped under a compliance regime, or AI-assisted engineering you landed, governed and measured — beyond pilots.
- A track record of setting technical vision for a platform and carrying an organization there.
- Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field, or equivalent practical experience.
Nice to have
- CWL/WDL/Nextflow, GA4GH standards (DRS/WES), FHIR or OMOP.
- Federated or cross-institutional data access at scale — bringing analysis to data held by someone else.
- Federal program delivery and artifact literacy — authorization packages, significant-change requests, and corrective-action plans.
- Architecture depth in inference topology: hosting trade-offs, retrieval that inherits per-tenant authorization, evaluation harnesses, and guardrails.
- Shipping reusable product capability out of grant- or program-funded work.
Competences
Vision
The ability to step back from the daily routine, explore ideas for the future, and see the platform in a broader context and in the longer term.
- articulates where the platform must be in three years, and why
- combines scientific, regulatory, and technology trends into one coherent direction
- spots opportunities for the platform early and acts on them
Technical Depth
Personal command of the technology the platform is built on, enough to shape and challenge its biggest decisions.
- reads code, designs, and test results first-hand rather than relying on summaries
- changes a team’s technical direction with evidence rather than authority
- is treated as a peer by senior engineers in design review
Managing
The ability to lead and develop others so they perform at their best — setting direction, providing the means, and holding the bar.
- builds a management layer capable of running delivery without them, then holds it accountable
- makes hiring and performance decisions promptly and explains them plainly
- builds confidence and momentum and creates a thriving team environment
Focus on Quality
Setting high standards and treating quality, security, and compliance as design constraints rather than gates to be cleared.
- designs for auditability, traceability, and reproducibility from the outset
- converts recurring incidents into architectural and process change
- declines shortcuts that would trade a compliance position for a delivery date
Decision Quality Under Ambiguity
The ability to make timely, defensible decisions on incomplete information, and to revisit them when the evidence changes.
- commits to a sequence when the data is partial, and states what would change their mind
- separates reversible from irreversible decisions and spends attention accordingly
- records the reasoning as well as the outcome
Benefits
Our core values
People first. We create collaborative and supportive environments by operating with respect and flexibility to promote mental, emotional and physical health. We practice empathy by treating others the way they want to be treated and assuming positive intent. We are proud of our inclusive diverse team and humble ourselves to learn about and build our connection with each other.
Patient focused. We act with swift determination without sacrificing our expectations of quality. We are driven by providing exceptional solutions for our customers to positively impact patient lives. Considering what is at stake, we challenge ourselves to develop the best solution, not just the easy one.
Integrity. We hold ourselves accountable and strive for transparent communication to build trust amongst ourselves and our customers. We take ownership of our results as we know what we do matters and collectively we will change the healthcare industry. We are thoughtful and intentional with every customer interaction understanding the overall impact on human health.
Curious. We ask questions and actively listen in order to learn and continuously improve. We embrace change and the opportunities it presents to make each other better. We strive to be on the cutting edge of science and technology innovation by encouraging creativity.
Impactful. We take our social responsibility with the seriousness it deserves and hold ourselves to a high standard. We improve our sustainability by encouraging discussion and taking action as it relates to our natural, social and economic resource footprint. We are devoted to our humanitarian mission and look for new ways to make the world a better place.
Velsera is an Equal Opportunity Employer:
Velsera is proud to be an equal opportunity employer committed to providing employment opportunity regardless of sex, race, creed, color, gender, religion, marital status, domestic partner status, age, national origin or ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, sexual orientation, pregnancy, military or veteran status, citizenship status, and genetic information
