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Principal Software Engineer

Nautilus Biotechnology
San Carlos, CA Full Time
POSTED ON 1/5/2026
AVAILABLE BEFORE 2/8/2026
At Nautilus, we have a big and important mission: improve the health of millions by unleashing the potential of the proteome to accelerate drug development and enable a new world of precision and personalized medicine. We are developing a single-molecule protein analysis platform of unprecedented sensitivity, scale, and ease of use that we believe will democratize access to the proteome – one of the most dynamic and valuable sources of biological insight. To accomplish this, we are pursuing hard scientific problems with an entrepreneurial mindset and creating a world-class team of builders, innovators, and dreamers across a wide range of disciplines.

We are hiring a Principal Software Engineer to join our growing team. As an early-stage company developing its core technologies, this role is necessarily multi-faceted: it includes both hands-on software development and technical leadership. You will design and build our cloud-based protein identification pipeline to identify – at scale – both proteins and proteoforms across multiple different assays. You will build tooling to store, transform, and load, and present scientific data to external customers and internal scientists. You will help grow the team to innovate and maintain these critical products. You will be responsible for directly designing, implementing, deploying, and supporting these projects, bringing current best practices around software engineering and excellence to the larger bioinformatics and software team, partnering with the product marketing organization to translate between product requirements and development work items, and providing mentorship and technical leadership for a high-performing team of multiple engineers. You will also collaborate with our biosciences teams to understand how scientists will interface with our tool suite, as well as with our bioinformatics teams to understand the optimal approaches for presenting our proteomics results and downstream analyses and visualizations to our end users. Your technical and leadership contributions will have a meaningful impact on our team and the company on our path to the future.

This position will report to the Associate Director of Software Engineering.

Responsibilities

  • You will own and deliver a major portion of our production protein identification pipeline and internal data management systems, including design, estimation and scheduling, development, deployment, and operationalization
  • You are comfortable moving between layers of the stack, from high-performance C code to web presentation layers and everything in between
  • You will work closely and cross-functionally with representatives of other disciplines, including bioinformatics, biology, and engineering, to deeply understand their workflows and problems – whether open-ended or well-defined – and solve them
  • You will remain current on new technologies and available vendor packages; evaluate them and make recommendations as necessary
  • You will mentor Software Engineers and Bioinformaticists to assist with skill/knowledge development through advice, coaching, and training opportunities
  • You will determine and implement software engineering process improvements and best practices

Requirements

  • A minimum of 10 years of relevant experience in a high performing software engineering organization(s) is required
  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or similar related field is required
  • You must have a strong, analytical background with the ability to translate complex algorithms into high performance software
  • You must have an excellent track record of delivering complex software systems on-time and with high quality
  • You must have fluency in a variety of programming concepts, languages, and tools – we are currently invested in Python, with C for time-critical tasks
  • You must understand the fundamentals of modern cloud-based architectures – we are currently invested in AWS Batch, Step Functions, Lambdas, and related technologies
  • You work well in teams, and have a track record of making your teams better
  • You have fun when building complex systems while working side-by-side with experts from a variety of disciplines

Nautilus Team Culture

  • We are curious go-getters: this is a team of life-long learners who aren’t afraid to tackle the big challenges while continuously pushing ourselves forward
  • We are detail oriented: we do great science by working smart and with diligence, and by learning from our mistakes
  • We are easy to work with: we want our workplace to be one where everyone can share their perspective and be treated with respect and kindness

Compensation Range: $224K - $337K

Salary : $224,000 - $337,000

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