Full-Time
Senior Software Engineer
BigHat Biosciences
51-200 employees
ML-guided antibody discovery and engineering
No salary listed
San Mateo, CA, USA
Hybrid
Hybrid role in San Mateo.
 Software Engineering (1) |
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- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building and owning production systems, including demonstrated end-to-end ownership of features or epics, or 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with prior experience in biotech, life sciences, laboratory environments, or scientific software, where domain knowledge meaningfully accelerates impact.
- A track record of owning features and epics end to end in a production software environment.
- Subject-matter expertise in at least one significant technical area and the ability to master new technical areas.
- The ability to work highly independently and initiate collaborations needed to deliver work spanning multiple parts of the codebase.
- The ability to balance development, architecture, and process effectively and help prioritize high-impact work.
- The ability to communicate clearly about progress, risks, tradeoffs, and outcomes, follow issues through resolution, and validate customer needs.
- The ability to adapt as priorities and focus areas shift and collaborate effectively with engineers inside and outside the direct team.
- Depth in several of the following technical areas: TypeScript, React, Material-UI, Vega, Python 3, SQLAlchemy, RESTful API design, AWS, relational databases, PostgreSQL, schema and query design, and Pandas.
- Lead projects end to end, from product requirements document through implementation, testing, release, and validation against the customer success metric.
- Own one or more major areas of the internally developed cloud-based platform as a subject-matter expert and serve as a cross-team and cross-organization resource.
- Take on net-new, 0-to-1 work from specification, design interactions between features and supporting infrastructure, and produce novel solutions where existing patterns fall short.
- Collaborate with and increasingly manage relationships with scientists and product owners to translate laboratory workflows into reliable software and iterate on success metrics.
- Operate and run engineering processes, including product requirements document reviews, stand-ups, pull request approvals, and other team ceremonies.
- Own the quality and outcomes of work and epics, including debugging, test failures, and production issues, while anticipating next steps and owning the trajectory of major features.
- Drive technical depth across the codebase, infrastructure, and systems, and improve the team's design and architectural principles.
- Design and build software across front-end and back-end systems, including databases, AWS services, runtimes, and supporting processes.
- Lead and review technical designs and product requirements documents, contribute architectural direction, and surface risks and tradeoffs early.
- Write, maintain, and improve automated testing for correctness, reliability, and maintainability.
- Run code reviews as a routine approver and provide high-leverage feedback that develops other engineers.
- Diagnose and resolve complex issues across production and development environments, including across system and environment boundaries.
- Improve internal engineering practices, documentation, tooling, and architecture, and help set and transmit appropriate urgency in partnership with engineering leaders.
- Prior experience in biotech, life sciences, laboratory environments, or scientific software, where domain knowledge meaningfully accelerates impact.
- Depth in PyTorch or other machine learning frameworks.
BigHat Biosciences designs and develops antibody therapies by combining machine learning with synthetic biology. Its Milliner platform integrates a wet-lab workflow with AI to discover, engineer, and fully characterize hundreds of recombinant antibodies each week, enabling rapid development of safer and more effective treatments for hard-to-treat diseases such as certain infections and cancers. Unlike traditional antibody discovery, Milliner provides end-to-end screening, purification, and characterization in a high-throughput, weekly workflow, speeding up the path from concept to candidate. The company differentiates itself through its integrated platform that couples ML-driven design with synthetic biology experimentation, a focus on challenging diseases, and a culture that emphasizes work-life balance. Its goal is to deliver faster, safer antibody therapies to patients by expanding access to rapid discovery and engineering capabilities for healthcare providers and patients alike.
Company Size
51-200
Company Stage
Series B
Total Funding
$99.3M
Headquarters
San Carlos, California
Founded
2019
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- January 7, 2026, Lilly expanded its BigHat collaboration through Lilly TuneLab.
- BigHat started NCT07529808 in June 2026 for BHB810 in gastric and GEJ cancer.
- The company raised $124.1 million in April 2025, extending runway into clinical execution.
What critics are saying
- BHB810 entered phase 1/2 on June 30, 2026; efficacy failure destroys platform credibility.
- BigHat depends on Lilly and other partners for validation, cash, and external leverage.
- If the first clinical programs disappoint through 2028, BigHat becomes a stranded preclinical company.
What makes BigHat Biosciences unique
- BigHat’s Milliner platform pairs automated wet lab iteration with machine learning at scale.
- June 10, 2026, BigHat hired Roche veteran Stefan Weigand as chief scientific officer.
- BigHat combines AI design, Synaffix ADC licensing, and internal biologics programs.
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Benefits
Professional Development Budget
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
↑ 1%1 year growth
↓ -3%2 year growth
↑ 2%BigHat Biosciences has appointed Stefan Weigand as Chief Scientific Officer. Weigand joins from Roche, where he led Large Molecule Research, overseeing approximately 350 scientists and the company's biologics pipeline from discovery through Phase I. At Roche, Weigand doubled the biologics research organisation's output to five to six molecules entering first-in-human trials annually. His team established therapeutic platforms including BrainShuttle and CrossMab, enabling over 60 molecules to advance into clinical development. At BigHat, Weigand will lead scientific strategy across the company's AI-driven drug design platform, which combines generative protein design with high-throughput experimental cycles. The platform uses Bayesian optimisation and reinforcement learning to engineer antibodies and complex protein therapeutics.
BigHat Biosciences raised $124 million in Series B funding led by S32 on April 28, 2025, with a pre-money valuation of $180 million. Participants included Amgen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Quadrille Capital, Gaingels, GRIDS Capital, Axial, Quain Investments, Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC, AME Cloud Ventures, and Kevin Moore.
Co-founder Mark DePristo has stepped down as CEO of Bighat Biosciences Inc. and is succeeded by fellow co-founder Peyton Greenside, who was president and CSO.
The Danish company Adcendo and Chinese company Multitude Therapeutics entered into a $1 billion deal to develop ADCs for the treatment of cancer; and in August, the FDA lifted a partial hold on a Phase 1 trial evaluating an ADC candidate developed by MediLink Therapeutics and BioNTech for the treatment of advanced or metastatic non-small cell lung cancer and breast cancer.
BigHat obtains access to Synaffix's site-specific ADC technology platform, and plans to combine Synaffix technology with its advanced ML antibody design platform to develop a new ADC pipeline