Principal Full-Stack Engineer

Who We Are

Verge is transforming drug discovery by using artificial intelligence and proprietary human data to solve the biggest driver of rising drug costs: high clinical failure rates. To achieve this, we have built one of the field’s largest corpuses of multi-modal patient molecular and clinical data, sourced directly from human tissue. Our team of engineers, neuroscientists, and biologists have so far delivered two drugs to clinic, discovered 282 new targets, and signed commercial partnerships worth in excess of $1.6B with Eli Lily and AstraZeneca.

Your Mission

Reporting to the Head of Product & Engineering, and working alongside Verge's platform and computational biology teams, the principal full-stack engineer will be responsible for writing and shipping the code that matures Verge's drug discovery engine to enable faster, easier access to data and rapid innovation for internal stakeholders, while laying the rails for Verge's third-party customers and partners to harness them directly in the future.

Verge's platform team is a small, highly autonomous group of scientists, engineers, and subject matter experts. The successful candidate will play a key part in scoping and directing the priorities and technical solutions they implement.

Your 12 Month Outcomes

• Mature internal target discovery service into self-serve tool for internal stakeholders

• MVP of self-serve SaaS platform built on top of internal service to allow external customers to leverage Verge's proprietary dataset and tools.

You Will Own

• Design and build user-facing web applications that transform data platform outputs into intuitive, self-service products for internal and external customers,

• Develop Django-based interfaces including views, templates, forms, and APIs that enable users to interact with underlying data and analysis,

• Create interactive dashboards, data visualization tools, and exploration interfaces that make complex data accessible to non-technical users,

• Collaborate with the Data Engineer to understand data structures, APIs, and pipeline outputs, translating them into compelling user experiences,

• Build authentication, authorisation, and user management systems to support multi-tenant SaaS operationsImplement customer onboarding flows, account management interfaces, and self-service configuration toolsIntegrate charting and visualization libraries (D3.js, Chart.js, Plotly) to produce scientifically accurate and user-friendly data displays,

• Build RESTful APIs and backend services that connect Django applications to the underlying data platform,

• Participate in user testing and gather feedback to iteratively improve product usability and feature set,

• Establish automated testing frameworks and CI/CD pipelines for reliable deployments,

• Monitor application performance, user behaviour analytics, and error tracking to identify improvement opportunities,

• Work cross-functionally with science, engineering, and commercial teams to prioritise features and gather requirements.

Requirements

Candidates must have:

• Either:

  • BS/MS in computer science or related field and demonstrable professional experience in software engineering within genomics, drug discovery, biotech, or similarly technical domains, or,

  • BS/MS in biology or other relevant scientific field, and demonstrable professional experience in software engineering in any vertical.

• 7+ years of professional experience building web applications as a full-stack engineer, either with extensive Django experience or a strong grasp of idiomatic Python,

• Extensive experience with frontend frameworks or libraries (React, Vue, or similar),

• Significant experience using data visualization libraries (D3.js, Chart.js, Plotly, etc.) to create impactful charts and dashboards for a variety of user stories,

• Deep understanding of the pros and cons of different databases for different use cases, and strong opinions on abstractions such as GraphQL and SQLAlchemy,

• Mastery of version control (Git), testing frameworks such as Pytest and Jest, and CI/CD pipelines,

• Professional fluency with web security best practices (CSRF, XSS, authentication, authorization) and state management,

• Demonstrable experience conceiving and implementing thoughtful user interfaces (whether hand-rolled or utilizing modern component libraries and frameworks) that help users rapidly experience the value of a service,

• Comfortable translating technical capabilities and internal functionality into user-facing features and benefits,

• Deep playbook for collaborating with both technical (e.g. data engineers, scientists) and non-technical (e.g. business development) stakeholders

Exceptional candidates may also have:

• Previous experience building SaaS products or multi-tenant web applications,

• Knowledge of modern CSS frameworks and component libraries,

• Extensive experience with web sockets or other real-time data streaming technologies in a web application context,

• Familiarity with the challenges of, and approaches to, working with data-intensive applications or scientific software,

• Experience working with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and containerization (Docker),

• Working knowledge of user analytics tools (Mixpanel, Amplitude, Google Analytics),

• Previous experience collaborating with scientific or technical end-users.

Finally, we seek candidates who embrace our values and way of working:

• Ability to thrive in uncertainty with frequently changing priorities

• Deep alignment with our values

• A passion for making an impact on patients