Vice President, Software Engineering - Seven Bridges Location: Remote. US preferred. India or EMEA candidates considered. Reports to: Chief Technology Officer 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.
RequirementsWhat 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 
