About The Position
ESQlabs is hiring a Principal Platform Engineer to build and operate the compute core, release pipeline, and deployment capabilities for a regulated scientific software platform. The platform uses AI agents to help scientists set up modeling analyses, while fixed, versioned procedures execute those analyses. The role ensures that analyses can be reproduced, delivered to clients, and audited later. It owns the compute core, release pipeline, deployment into client environments, and usage metering and provenance for results. The AI layer has a separate lead and team; this role builds the platform they use. The Quality Manager sets the standards, and this role implements them. The position reports to the CEO. ESQlabs is an internationally active Contract Research Organization and a global leader in the development and application of the Open Systems Pharmacology Suite. Its work combines mechanistic modeling, PBPK and QSP with software and training to support Model-Informed Drug Development and Next-Generation Risk Assessment for pharmaceutical, chemical, and academic partners. The role offers ownership and autonomy in a small, senior team developing an open-source platform used by regulators and pharmaceutical companies. ESQlabs describes a flat, collaborative start-up culture and a mandate to set standards for certified scientific software.
Requirements
- At least five years of platform, infrastructure, or backend engineering experience, including senior ownership of a production system.
- Practical experience with reproducible builds and execution, including dependency pinning, artifact hashing, immutable versioning, and supply chain integrity.
- Experience with Kubernetes or a similar orchestrator, monitoring, and release management for environments not fully controlled by the organization.
- Experience designing APIs whose schemas served as contracts with external consumers, including practical versioning and deprecation.
- Security engineering experience for multi-tenant systems, including isolation, secrets, authorization, and awareness of risks from language-model-driven systems.
- Interest in acquiring experience with GxP or equivalent regulated software is required.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with hermetic build systems.
- Exposure to GxP or equivalent regulated software.
Responsibilities
- Make the scientific compute core deterministic through pinned R, Python, and solver toolchains; content-addressed container images with a software bill of materials; and tests for byte-identical re-execution on a reference platform and tolerance-bounded re-execution across platforms.
- Build services for the AI layer, including isolated executors for each client without network access, usage metering per call, and a signed record and certificate for every result.
- Build the policy engine and tool router in collaboration with the AI lead.
- Expose the platform as a versioned API and as tools for AI agents using one shared contract, and provide a reproducibility package that can re-execute a run outside the platform.
- Run the evaluation pipeline in continuous integration, including conformance tests against reference case sets, re-execution tests, regression tests, and storage of results per procedure version.
- Own release engineering and operations, including CI/CD pipelines, signed and content-addressed releases, scripted installation qualification, environment management for hosted and client-tenant deployments and later offline deployments, monitoring, incident handling, and the operating model used by the deployment engineer.
- Implement technical controls supporting the information security and AI management standards owned by the Quality Manager.
Benefits
- Flexible work hours.
- Home office policy focused on people rather than numbers.
- Attractive remuneration package.
- Regular in-person team gatherings at locations across Europe.
- Authority to solve a clearly defined technical problem with commercial consequences properly rather than quickly.
- An environment where contributions make a difference and employees can take ownership of projects and processes.
- Opportunity to work in a small, senior team that owns an open-source platform used by regulators and pharmaceutical companies.
- Responsibility, autonomy, participation, and career perspective.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
Education Level
No Education Listed
