SeniorStaff Data Engineer (Scientific Data Engineer)

Merge Labs is a frontier research lab with the mission of bridging biological and artificial intelligence to maximize human ability agency and experience. Were pursuing this goal by developing fundamentally new approaches to brain-computer interfaces that interact with the brain at high bandwidth integrate with advanced AI and are ultimately safe and accessible for anyone to use.

About the team:

Sufficiently advanced BCIs can restore lost abilities support healthier brain states deepen our connection with each other and expand what we can imagine and create alongside advanced AI. Our team is responsible for turning this vision into algorithms. Working across synthetic biology neuroscience device physics signal processing and machine learning we design more effective ways to bridge human and artificial intelligence. We design experiments and analytical frameworks collect data train models and optimize performance to build Brain-AI systems that can scale to many people and many uses. We move with urgency balancing creative exploration with engineering rigor because expanding human ability agency and experience is one of the most important challenges of our time.

About the role:

As the senior-most data engineer on the team youll define and own the pipelines that capture process and serve the data driving Merges molecular optimization platform. Youll translate heterogeneous laboratory outputs into well-structured queryable schema-driven datasets that power scientific analysis and closed-loop ML. Youll work directly with experimentalists to establish data standards and metadata conventions and with ML engineers to make results available in production-grade systems.

This role reports to the Head of Software and is highly cross-functionalspanning software engineering data architecture and scientific informatics. As part of the Core Software team you will be directly supported by infrastructure specialists and you will work directly with the Application Development Lead to ensure that necessary scientific and user inputs are captured.

In this role you will:

• Build and operate ingestion pipelines from laboratory instruments into centralized storage.

• Design schemas and metadata capture standards for experimental data.

• Implement post-processing pipelines that produce analysis-ready datasets for scientists.

• Establish monitoring alerting and structured logging for both pipeline and data quality.

• Partner with biologists to map experimental workflows to data models.

• Build interfaces (APIs dashboards and LLM-enabled tools) that make data easily accessible.

• Drive continuous improvement of data infrastructure as new protocols and data types emerge.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 510 years of experience building and operating data pipelines or backend systems in production.

• Strong software fundamentals in Python SQL and data modeling; familiarity with C low-latency data pipelines and on-premises deployments preferred.

• Experience designing schemas and metadata frameworks for complex evolving datasets.

• Proven ability to partner with non-technical users to understand needs and ship usable systems.

• Comfort owning systems end-to-endfrom design and implementation to deployment and monitoring.

• Background in computational biology bioinformatics or scientific data systems.

If youre excited about this role but dont meet every qualification please apply. As we build were hiring for complementary strengths to form a high-impact team.

Merge Labs does not discriminate on the basis of race color religion national origin age sex sexual orientation gender gender identity gender expression marital status physical or mental disability medical condition genetic information family status ancestry citizenship U.S. military (state and federal) and veteran status or any other legally protected status. It is our intention that all applicants be given equal opportunity and that selection decisions are based on job related factors. We are an equal opportunity employer.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities and requests can be made by emailing

Required Experience:

Staff IC