Software Engineer (Open Level)

About the Position 

We're hiring Software Engineers to help implement what engineering looks like at an AI-native pharma company. This is not a traditional SWE role and it's not an ML research role - it's for someone who builds production software in a world where AI has fundamentally changed what one engineer can do.

At Formation the lines between engineering product management and data science are converging. Engineers talk directly to users PMs write code and domain experts across the company build and deploy real tools. We need engineers who thrive in that environment: people who move fast care about the problem they're solving (not just the code) and see AI tools as a permanent force multiplier rather than a novelty.

You'll work across the drug development lifecycle - building systems that accelerate how we find evaluate develop and deliver new medicines. You'll collaborate with clinical regulatory BD and operations teams not from behind a ticket queue but embedded in the work. Some of what you build will be net-new products. Some will be infrastructure that enables non-engineers to build safely alongside you. All of it matters.

If you're energized by opportunity and motivated by the idea that your work directly helps get medicines to patients faster this is the role.

Responsibilities

• Design build and ship production software that accelerates drug development - from internal tools to user-facing products to platform capabilities.
• Use AI tools (LLMs agentic coding systems retrieval-augmented pipelines) as a core part of how you work not as an experiment on the side.
• Get close to the business. Understand the clinical regulatory or operational problem you're solving well enough to make good product decisions without waiting for a spec.
• Build for composability. Clean APIs structured schemas machine-readable documentation - what you build needs to be discoverable and extensible by people and agents who aren't engineers.
• Review and enable contributions from non-engineers. PMs designers and domain experts across the company are shipping code. You help ensure quality security and maintainability.
• Build the guardrails that lift technical quality. Proactively create automated tools - security scanners skill files for end users agents that clean up and standardize non-engineer code - that raise the floor of quality across the entire organization without slowing anyone down.
• Prototype rapidly. Many ideas should be live and testable within days not weeks. Build the tool get feedback iterate.
• Collaborate across engineering data science product and domain teams - the boundaries between these functions are fluid here and we expect you to operate across them.

About You 

• A track record of shipping production systems in ambiguous fast-moving environments.
• You build with AI tools daily. Claude Code Copilot agentic workflows - whatever the best current tools are you're already using them and have opinions about what works.
• Strong fundamentals: you write clean maintainable code you understand distributed systems and cloud infrastructure (AWS GCP or Azure) and you can debug hard problems.
• You're drawn to the problem space not just the stack. You'd rather understand why a clinical operations team needs a tool than debate framework choices in isolation.
• Comfortable with ambiguity. You've worked in 0-to-1 settings or early-stage environments where the playbook didn't exist. That energizes you.
• Excellent communicator. You can explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and align a room around a decision.
• Experience in pharma biotech or life sciences. Genuine curiosity about the domain.
• You want to operate at a higher tempo and a higher standard than you have before and you want to be surrounded by people who hold themselves to the same bar.

Total Compensation Range: $204500 - $267000

What We Do

Formation Bio is a tech-driven pharma company differentiated by radically more efficient drug development. Formation Bio has built a technology platform that optimizes all aspects of drug development enabling more efficient trial design faster trial completion and higher quality trial data capture. Formation Bio acquires clinical-stage drugs from pharma and biotech and develops them faster and more efficiently unlocking greater value per program and accelerating access to new treatments for patients. Join our culture of innovation where your work directly contributes to transforming patient care in areas such as rheumatology dermatology CNS and cardiometabolic diseases. Our dynamic environment blends advanced technology with strategic drug development speeding up the delivery of new treatments. Here every role plays a part in our mission to bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently.

Why Work With Us

Our mission is our roadmap and north star. We are an impact-driven culture that hires for intelligence and low egos. We believe that the best employees are both smart and ambitious but also demonstrate humility and curiosity.

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