Senior Platform Engineer, Lab Infrastructure and Security

Plasmidsaurus • San Francisco, CA

6d • $205,000 - $250,000

About The Position

At Plasmidsaurus, our infrastructure doesn't just run software. It powers the sequencers, robots, and compute systems that help scientists around the world speed up their research and get to breakthrough discoveries faster. We're looking for a Platform Engineer to build and scale the infrastructure behind our 10 labs worldwide. You'll work across networking, hardware, cloud infrastructure, automation, and security, and you’ll have the freedom to architect solutions to complex engineering challenges. Your work will directly shape how quickly we launch new labs, expand sequencing capacity, and deliver reliable results to scientists solving some of the most important problems in the world.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
• 7+ years of experience in platform, infrastructure, systems, or security engineering, ideally supporting physical production environments.
• Strong experience automating infrastructure with Python, Terraform, Ansible, and CI/CD workflows using GitHub Actions, including network device configuration and provisioning.
• Deep networking expertise, including routing, VLANs, firewalls, DHCP/DNS, VPNs (including Tailscale), and high-availability architectures. Experience with pfSense or MikroTik strongly preferred.
• Hands-on experience in AWS, including networking (VPC, site-to-cloud connectivity), IAM, and containerized workloads (ECS, Lambda)
• Excellent Linux systems administration skills, including system services, deployments, containers, and infrastructure configuration.
• Hands-on security engineering experience, including web/API penetration testing or red teaming, vulnerability and dependency scanning, and incident response.
• Ownership of production reliability, including on-call responsibilities, diagnosing complex infrastructure failures, and restoring service quickly.
• Experience using AI coding agents as a primary development tool across the software lifecycle, including infrastructure automation, development, and security testing.
• Experience with PKI, certificate management, and secrets management, ideally including internal CAs, ACME, or AWS Private CA.
• Experience building observability for fleets of production devices and services, including metrics, logging, and alerting.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with pfSense or MikroTik strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

• Architect and scale the networks powering sequencers, robotics, and compute across our 10 global labs. Own network architecture and reliability, including pfSense, MikroTik, HA firewalls, VLANs, DHCP/DNS, Tailscale, and inter-site connectivity.
• Architect and deploy networking for new labs and expansions, from rack and switch infrastructure to high-speed 10Gb connectivity between sequencers and storage.
• Automate network provisioning and configuration with Terraform, Ansible, and CI/CD to make infrastructure deployments faster, more consistent, and reliable.
• Build and improve the infrastructure supporting our production hardware, including Illumina and Oxford Nanopore sequencers, Opentrons robots, lab instruments, GPU clusters, and storage. Own connectivity, observability, and scalability as sequencing capacity grows.
• Build and maintain secure, automated device identity and access systems using PKI, AWS IAM Roles Anywhere, and SSH.
• Own and strengthen the security of our cloud infrastructure, web applications, and APIs through proactive testing, AI-assisted red teaming, and close collaboration with Product Engineering to resolve vulnerabilities.
• Build and operate vulnerability management across cloud infrastructure, lab devices, and application dependencies, including scanning, patching, and secrets management.
• Lead technical security incident response, from detection and containment through resolution and postmortems, continuously improving our ability to prevent and respond to threats.

Benefits

• We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior