Head of Engineering

Position Title: Head of Engineering, with planned advancement path to VP of Engineering as Informuta scales.

Location: 3210 Merryfield Row, San Diego, CA 92121

Open to remote

Reports To: Chief Executive Officer, Kalen Hall, PhD

Start Date: Target late August - early September 2026. Flexible for the right candidate.

Job Type: Full-time

About Informuta

Informuta is an infectious disease intelligence company whose mission is to make bacterial evolution predictable, enabling clinicians and health systems to prevent antibiotic resistance before it harms patients. Informuta uses proprietary AI/ML and novel predictive genomic biomarkers to forecast future bacterial evolution and antibiotic resistance trajectories, helping prevent catastrophic treatment failures.

We are a seed-stage startup with a current team size of 10 and are quickly doubling in size over the next 6-12 months. We are an interdisciplinary team working on an interdisciplinary problem across bacteriology and DNA biology, genomics, AI/ML, clinical microbiology, infectious disease clinical practice, antimicrobial stewardship, and clinical lab science.

We are founded on two core values: 1) Own the outcome and 2) Win as one team. Simply put, we are relentlessly individually accountable but collectively responsible to our mission.

About the Role

We are looking for our next key hire and leader to lead our engineering and dry-lab R&D team. This is a high-ownership, collaborative, and interdisciplinary role that will work across and ultimately own own the engineering operating system across Informuta’s infrastructure, cloud architecture, security, data systems, bioinformatics pipelines, and ML engineering workflows. This person will frequently collaborate with Informuta's CEO, Chief Medical Officer, VP of Clinical Microbiology, Lab Director, lab team, and quality/regulatory to translate product strategy decisions into roadmaps, timelines, architecture, and trade-offs. We do not expect one person to be the deepest expert in every domain. We do expect strong technical judgment, the ability to ask the right questions across domains, and the leadership to hire, manage, or bring in specialists where needed.

The Head of Engineering will inherit a newly stabilized, yet still early-stage, technical operating system. The initial job is to take ownership, rapidly iterate based on initial launch and customer feedback, translate CEO roadmap and product strategy decisions into engineering and delivery timelines, harden what works, and lead the next stage of regulated diagnostic software and model-product development. The Head of Engineering will run a small team of 3 engineers/scientists as well as two fractional contractors and will have budget to immediately recruit 2-3 additional FTEs in partnership with the CEO.

Mission for the First 6-12 Months

• Assume engineering ownership from the CEO after commercial launch: Partner closely with the CEO initially, then progressively take ownership of engineering meetings, technical prioritization, sprint planning, risk review, and delivery accountability.
• Stabilize the technical operating system so the Informuta product service can receive isolates/data, process FASTQs, generate QC/bioinformatics/model outputs, produce report packages where in scope, archive outputs, and support customer delivery reproducibly.
• Support CLIA/CAP readiness without overbuilding by partnering with the Lab Director, Technical Supervisor, and wet lab team to make computational workflows inspectable, documented, versioned, and change-controlled.
• Execute R&D and product development strategy with the Founder/CEO, Chief Medical Officer, and VP of Clinical Microbiology, turning infrastructure, incoming data, and reporting concepts into a coherent engineering roadmap with release gates and validation standards.
• Build the engineering organization by mentoring the current engineering team, managing contractors, hiring the next generation of data/bioinformatics/platform talent, developing the hiring roadmap, and fostering a durable engineering culture.

Key Responsibilities

Commercial Launch Continuity and Technical Ownership

• Own the post-launch technical roadmap and operating cadence.
• Convert V1 launch lessons into V1.1/V2 technical priorities, including automation, reliability, reporting, dashboards, customer feedback, and partner-specific scaling.
• Ensure deliverables remain aligned with CEO-set standards and guidelines, customer expectations, and investor diligence needs.
• Own technical decision-making around what is productized, what remains internal-only, what is deferred, and what requires additional validation before customer-facing use.

DMS, Data Spine, and Partner Data Workflows

• Own the DMS roadmap after the V1 buildout.
• Ensure robust linkage across customer/order, partner data extracts, LIS accessioning, internal isolate IDs, FASTQs, pipeline outputs, model outputs, report packages, billing counts, and archive records.
• Improve data validation, missingness tracking, model- and report-ready exports, suppression rules, data lineage, and future V2 dashboards.
• Partner with wet lab and lab ops so the DMS reflects physical sample reality rather than theoretical workflows.

Cloud, Platform, Pipeline, and Security

• Own on-prem/cloud pipeline architecture and continuity after fractional platform support.
• Maintain and harden containerized pipelines for Informuta’s internal analysis.
• Implement engineering hygiene: versioned releases, run manifests, reproducible reruns, logging, artifact storage, backups, code review, tests, and access controls.

Model R&D, Release Gates, and Productization

• Own the engineering interface between model R&D and productized outputs.
• Work with the engineering team, CMO, VP of Clinical Microbiology, Lab Director, and CEO to define drug menus, model release gates, reportability thresholds, suppression rules, feature/version tracking, and evaluation documentation.
• Support model iteration and development while preventing open-ended R&D from blocking service execution.

Bioinformatics and Scientific Software Productization

• Work with engineers to turn bioinformatics prototypes into reproducible, documented, structured, report-ready modules.
• Ensure modules have explicit input schemas, output schemas, tool/database versions, thresholds, limitations, test batches, and rerun instructions.

CLIA/CAP Readiness and Regulated Diagnostics Trajectory

• Partner with Lab Director and wet lab leadership to align computational workflows with future CLIA/CAP expectations, without prematurely converting into a clinical diagnostic system.
• Create software/process artifacts that will later support validation and inspection: version control, change-control rationale, access inventory, audit trail, runbooks, SOPs, deviation handling, and training records.

Team Leadership and Cross-Functional Execution

• Own engineering meetings, sprint planning, risk review, and delivery accountability.
• Mentor the current engineering team and coach their development as growing individual contributors and owners of technical work in the company.
• Manage fractional contractors and convert temporary support into durable internal capability.
• Communicate technical status clearly to CEO, Board/investors, clinical leadership, wet lab, and customer-facing stakeholders.

Experience

Required

• 8+ years of software, data, ML platform, bioinformatics, or technical infrastructure experience, with at least 3+ years leading engineering execution or technical teams.
• Demonstrated experience taking research/prototype systems into reliable production or production-like use.
• Hands-on Python engineering experience and ability to review, debug, and guide code.
• Experience with cloud-based batch data pipelines in AWS and/or GCP, including storage, IAM, containers, logs, cost controls, and reproducible runs.
• Strong understanding of data systems: SQL, schema design, data validation, lineage, auditability, exports, and user-facing operational tools.
• Experience with ML model serving or batch inference, including model artifacts, versioning, input/output schemas, and evaluation documentation.
• Ability to operate in a regulated or regulated-adjacent environment where documentation, traceability, access control, and change control matter.
• Strong technical product judgment and knows when to build, defer, cut scope, or bring in specialist support.
• Excellent cross-functional communication with scientists, clinicians, wet lab, founders, contractors, and non-engineering stakeholders.

Strongly Preferred

• Prior leadership in diagnostics, regulated healthtech, clinical genomics, microbial genomics, infectious disease, or bioinformatics SaaS/service environments.
• Experience supporting CLIA/CAP, LDT, FDA SaMD, GxP, HIPAA/security, or other quality-regulated software/data systems.
• Familiarity with bioinformatics or scientific computing pipelines, especially file-based workflows, FASTQs, QC outputs, variant/pipeline artifacts, and structured result generation.
• Hands-on experience with bacterial WGS workflows, Illumina data, bacterial variant calling, resistance gene workflows, phylogenetics, or similar tools.
• Experience building internal data management systems, LIMS/LIS/DMS integrations, laboratory workflow tools, or scientific operations consoles.
• Experience with ML applied to genomics, longitudinal clinical data, antibiotic resistance, treatment outcomes, or time-series risk modeling.
• Experience managing fractional contractors and converting fragile founder-led systems into durable team-owned systems.
• Experience in seed-stage or Series A startups where ambiguity, resource constraints, and high-stakes delivery coexist.

Compensation Package

Base salary

• Target compensation: $160k–$210k base salary plus 1–2% incentive stock options, based on experience, stage fit, and scope. Informuta is open to discussing structure for exceptional candidates.
• Advancement plan to VP of Engineering

Benefits

• Health, vision, dental, and life insurance
• 401(k) plan and matching
• Discretionary PTO