Technical Lead, Product

About Bioptimus

Bioptimus is building the first universal AI foundation model for biology to fuel breakthrough discoveries and accelerate innovation in biomedicine. With more than $75M in funding, Bioptimus is a fast-growing start-up headquartered in Paris, incorporated in October 2023. Backed by leading international venture capitalists, our world-class team of scientists and engineers is redefining the frontiers of AI and life sciences.

About the Role

We are looking for a Technical Lead to build the product that puts our foundation models for biology into the hands of scientists and engineers. From the back-end services that serve our models, to the APIs that compose them into capabilities, to the feature-level interfaces that bring them to users—you will own features end to end and turn cutting-edge research into reliable, well-crafted products. You'll work in close partnership with our Product Engineers. This is a senior builder's role at the intersection of AI and biology. You'll work across the stack and across teams, set technical direction on the surfaces you own, mentor other engineers, and partner closely with R&D to ship software that makes our models usable and dependable.

Responsibilities

• Product Development (End to End): Design, build, test, and ship features spanning back-end services and front-end interfaces for our B2B biology products. Take features from idea to production and own them in operation, balancing speed with quality and maintainability.
• Back-End & Services: Design and maintain robust, scalable services and APIs (REST, gRPC) that compose our packaged models into product capabilities. Build data workflows and work fluently with our core stack (Python, SQL, and related technologies).
• Building on the SDK & Model Packages: Build product on top of the SDK and model packages produced by our Product Engineers, and feed back what the product layer needs from those interfaces.
• Technical Leadership: Set engineering patterns and standards for the surfaces you own, lead design on ambiguous, cross-cutting problems, and mentor other engineers through code review and pairing.
• AI-Assisted Development: Use agentic coding tools (e.g., opencode, Claude) to accelerate delivery, and help shape how our team adopts AI-native development workflows.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with Product Engineers and platform/infra engineers to align what we build with real scientific and customer needs.

Requirements

• Technical Proficiency:
  • Advanced Python Proficiency: Several years of experience writing clean, well-tested, maintainable Python in production, with a track record of owning features end to end.
  • Full-Stack Capability: Strong across back-end services and comfortable with modern front-end development (JavaScript/TypeScript with a modern framework such as React, Vue, or similar).
  • Data & Storage: Solid working knowledge of SQL and designing sensible data workflows.
  • Cloud Deployment Expertise: Hands-on experience deploying applications and ML models in the cloud (AWS strongly preferred; GCP/Azure a plus) using containers (Docker, Kubernetes).
  • Software Engineering Fundamentals: Strong grasp of core computer science principles, data structures, and modern CI/CD workflows.
• Solution Design & Leadership:
  • Software Design & Architecture: Excellent grasp of object-oriented and functional design principles, with the ability to reason about and explain trade-offs between performance, simplicity, and modularity.
  • Setting Direction: Demonstrated experience setting technical patterns, leading design on cross-cutting work, and mentoring other engineers.
  • APIs & Integration: Experience designing and integrating APIs (e.g., REST, gRPC) to ship complex applications.
  • AI-Native Tooling: Comfortable working with agentic coding tools (e.g., opencode, Claude) as part of your day-to-day workflow.
• Communication & Collaboration:
  • Clear Communication: You can explain technical concepts to diverse audiences (from PhD scientists to DevOps engineers) with clarity and empathy.
  • Team-First Attitude: Independent, curious, and detail-oriented; thrives in a dynamic environment; and is fun to work with.

Education

• MSc or equivalent experience in Computer Science or a related technical field.

Languages

• Full professional fluency in English is required for this role.

How to Stand Out

These are not required, but would be a plus:

• Direct experience working in Pharma, Biotech, or Healthcare.
• Experience building developer-facing products or platforms used by external customers.
• Experience leading a team or technically owning a significant product area.
• Deep experience with the AWS ecosystem and ML-relevant services (SageMaker, EC2, S3, IAM, RDS).
• Familiarity with deep-learning frameworks like PyTorch or JAX, and AI ecosystem libraries such as Hugging Face Transformers.
• Experience with the lifecycle of AI models, including deployment, hosting, and optimization for low-latency inference.
• Experience building data-rich or scientific visualizations in the front-end.
• Experience contributing to and/or maintaining open-source projects.
• Experience in a startup or innovative environment, showing adaptability, proactiveness, and eagerness to take on varied responsibilities.