Software Engineer, Data & ML

Foray Bioscience•Cambridge, MA

3d•$105,000 - $130,000•Onsite

About The Position

Foray is a plant production company using plant cells, artificial intelligence, and advanced biomanufacturing to grow materials, molecules, and seeds directly from the cell up. By combining predictive AI/ML with in vitro plant biology, Foray helps unlock resilient crops, scalable seed systems, harvest-free plant products, and new forms of bioproduction across industries. Our work is powered by Pando, Foray’s foundational workspace for plant science. With novel plant datasets and emerging predictive models, Pando helps researchers design and optimize plant production workflows with greater speed and reliability, making plant production more than 3x more successful and more than 3x faster. Together, Foray’s software and biomanufacturing platforms are creating new ways to produce what we need from plants while building more resilient plant industries. We’re looking for a mission-driven Software Engineer to help build the software and data foundation behind Pando. You’ll work across the product, from backend services and data systems to user-facing features. A major part of this role will be turning complex scientific and experimental information into reliable, useful data that can power both Pando and our machine learning systems. We’re looking for a strong engineer who can reason through unfamiliar problems, learn quickly, and build thoughtful systems. You’ll work closely with software engineers, biologists, and machine learning researchers and have meaningful ownership over both what we build and how we build it. This is an opportunity to join early, work across disciplines, and help build an entirely new way of working with plants.

Requirements

Strong software engineering generalist with particular depth in backend and data systems.
Experience shipping production-grade software and designing backend systems, data pipelines, databases, APIs, or other data-intensive infrastructure
Familiarity with MLOps and the infrastructure needed to run AI models in production
Strong in Python and comfortable working with relational databases, APIs, and modern software systems
Comfortable turning messy, heterogeneous, or unstructured information into trustworthy data, including through natural language processing, information extraction, or similar techniques
Understanding of good scientific data practices, including quality, provenance, versioning, reproducibility, permissions, and access controls
Statistical fluency to reason about experimental data, uncertainty, and design of experiments
Ability to work effectively with scientists and machine learning researchers
Ability to bring informed technical opinions without being dogmatic, learn unfamiliar domains quickly, and enjoy solving ambiguous problems with significant ownership

Nice To Haves

Experience with scientific or biological data
Experience with machine learning infrastructure
Experience with predictive modeling, optimization, or AI applications

Responsibilities

Build and ship production software across Pando, with a focus on backend systems, APIs, data infrastructure, and the systems that support user-facing product experiences
Design and maintain how scientific and experimental data is ingested, structured, stored, versioned, accessed, and used across the organization
Build workflows that turn complex and unstructured sources, including scientific literature and natural language, into reliable, structured data for product and machine learning applications
Partner with scientists and machine learning researchers to translate experimental workflows, statistical analyses, and design-of-experiment approaches into scalable software, data systems, and predictive tools
Establish strong practices around data quality, provenance, reproducibility, access management, and reliability as Foray’s scientific data and software systems scale
Make thoughtful technical and architectural decisions, balancing speed, simplicity, scalability, and long-term maintainability as the platform evolves