Data Engineer; Forward Deployed

At the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), we’re on a mission to translate scientific discovery into real world impact. We bring together visionary scientists, technologists, engineers, researchers, educators and innovators to tackle humanity’s greatest challenges in four transformative areas:

• Health, Medical Science & Generative Biology
• Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture
• Climate Change & Managing CO₂
• Artificial Intelligence & Robotics

This is ambitious work - work that demands curiosity, courage, and a relentless drive to make a difference. At EIT, you’ll join a community built on excellence, innovation, tenacity, trust, and collaboration, where bold ideas become real-world breakthroughs. Together, we push boundaries, embrace complexity, and create solutions to scale ideas from lab to society. Explore more .org.

The Scientific Compute and Data team builds the compute, data and tooling foundation behind EIT's science. We run the cloud and GPU infrastructure that the models train on, the data infrastructure that instruments, robots and researchers use, and the data products and shared data models that let one team's results be built on by the next. We provide hands‑on expertise in platform engineering, data engineering, and data management, and create common tooling for every lab to accelerate their experiments across gene editing, battery chemistry, plant biology and more.

At EIT we are seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join our Scientific Compute and Data Team. Forward Deployed Data Engineers are a key interface between our core data systems and the research and engineering projects across EIT. You’ll work side‑by‑side with scientists and engineers in frontier AI and robotics, generative and plant biology, or pathogen surveillance. You will disseminate data engineering best practices into the institutes, ensuring that datasets are accurate, reproducible, versioned‑controlled, well‑structured, and ready for ML.

You will help scientists turn raw information from various sources into high‑quality resources, ensuring our technical foundations support the next generation of discovery.

This is a hands‑on role for those who thrive on collaborating directly with researchers and engineers, solving problems quickly, and turning complex research requirements into scalable, reliable data pipelines while contributing to the broader EIT platform. We are looking for clear, respectful communicators who are comfortable bringing their own expertise into diverse groups.

• Partner with scientists and engineers to deliver robust, reproducible data pipelines that meet research needs across disciplines.
• Own ingestion, storage, curation, and transformation of diverse biological datasets and formats, such as structured/tabular data, unstructured text, high I/O formats like LMDB/Arrow/HDF5, or domain‑specific formats such as fastq/fasta and cif.
• Package and deploy code in research environments using containers (e.g. Docker).
• Scale processing across distributed cloud warehouses/storage via container orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes), High-Performance GPU Compute (e.g. Slurm), or distributed compute frameworks (e.g. Spark, Ray).
• Contribute to an engineering culture that values maintainability, testing, robust system design, and deep collaboration, but allows flexibility for rapid prototyping and responsiveness to changing landscapes.

Nobody checks every box - if you are excited about this role and think you could contribute, we encourage you to apply.

• You have strong programming experience in Python, and value code quality, reliability, and readability as much as performance.
• You have a deep understanding of…