VP of Engineering

Join our team as a VP of Engineering and help virtualize biological experiments to accelerate discovery!

About Turbine

Turbine is building Virtual Assays - AI-powered predictive models that can run biological experiments in silico. We're combining deep learning with a systematic approach to biology to enable faster, cheaper, more extensive testing. Our team is small, focused, and composed of researchers and engineers who care deeply about getting biology right.

About This Role

We're looking for a VP of Engineering to own technical leadership across Turbine's engineering organization.

You'll build and lead the teams developing our Virtual Lab platform -the infrastructure and systems that power our Virtual Assay capabilities - while ensuring alignment, operational excellence, and scalability across the entire engineering function.

This is a hands-on leadership role where you'll drive technical strategy, maintain system reliability, establish infrastructure discipline, and partner closely with Product and AI to translate our scientific vision into robust, compliant, scalable systems.

You are a Turbiner if these personality traits apply to you:

• You have self-awareness and strong intention on personal growth
• You seek out feedback and learn from mistakes and apply what you learned
• You take responsibility and focus on the outcomes over tasks
• You focus on shared success and are open to challenging others respectfully to get the best possible outcome
• You are in it for the long haul and have passion for our mission

Key Responsibilities

• Build and lead engineering teams working on the Virtual Lab platform; ensure they are healthy, motivated, and staffed appropriately to deliver current products and anticipate future technical needs
• Ensure Virtual Lab remains stable, performant, and operational at all times—owning reliability, incident response, and continuous improvement
• Establish and maintain engineering standards, best practices, and technical alignment across the entire company to prevent silos and technical debt
• Partner with Product to collect, analyze, and interpret system and user analytics; provide data-driven insights that inform product decisions and prioritization
• Own scalability of architecture, ensuring our systems can grow with our data and user needs without accumulating technical debt
• Lead compliance and security initiatives—understanding regulatory requirements and ensuring engineering practices and security posture remain current and robust
• Build systems and processes to prevent infrastructure debris—manage unused resources, derelict deployments, and abandoned services to maintain cost efficiency and operational clarity
• Mentor and develop engineering talent; create a culture of learning, ownership, and high standards

What We're Looking For

You have proven experience leading engineering teams and building scalable systems:

• 5+ years of engineering leadership experience, ideally at least 2 years in a VP or director-level role
• Deep expertise in building and maintaining production systems at scale—databases, APIs, infrastructure, reliability
• Track record of building strong engineering cultures, hiring great talent, and developing people
• Strong communication skills-comfortable explaining technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders

Nice to Have

• Experience in regulated industries (healthcare, biotech, pharmaceuticals) or with compliance-critical systems (HIPAA, FDA, etc.)
• Experience shipping AI or AI-adjacent products; familiarity with ML infrastructure, model serving, or AI-specific system requirements
• Exposure to biology, bioinformatics, or scientific computing
• Experience shipping data-intensive products or scientific software
• Background in infrastructure, DevOps, or platform engineering