Engineering Manager, Infrastructure
About the role
About Formation Bio
Formation Bio is a tech and AI driven pharma company differentiated by radically more efficient drug development.
Advancements in AI and drug discovery are creating more candidate drugs than the industry can progress because of the high cost and time of clinical trials. Recognizing that this development bottleneck may ultimately limit the number of new medicines that can reach patients, Formation Bio, founded in 2016 as TrialSpark Inc., has built technology platforms, processes, and capabilities to accelerate all aspects of drug development and clinical trials. Formation Bio partners, acquires, or in-licenses drugs from pharma companies, research organizations, and biotechs to develop programs past clinical proof of concept and beyond, ultimately helping to bring new medicines to patients. The company is backed by investors across pharma and tech, including a16z, Sequoia, Sanofi, Thrive Capital, John Doerr, Spark Capital, SV Angel Growth, and others.
You can read more at the following links:
At Formation Bio, our values are the driving force behind our mission to revolutionize the pharma industry. Every team and individual at the company shares these same values, and every team and individual plays a key part in our mission to bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently.
About the Position
As the Engineering Manager for Infrastructure at Formation Bio, you will lead the team responsible for the reliability, security, and operational foundation of our engineering organization. You will set technical direction, develop a high-performing team, and create the systems and operating practices that allow engineers to ship quickly and safely. You're accountable for the pace, reliability, and quality of the systems your team builds and operates, and for creating the conditions in which engineers can grow, perform at a high level, and sustain that performance over time.
Formation Bio is an AI-native engineering organization, and Infrastructure has a central role in defining what that means operationally. You and your team will develop the systems, access patterns, guardrails, delivery workflows, and observability needed for engineers and agents to build and operate production software safely. We are looking for a leader with a credible point of view on how infrastructure and software delivery should evolve as AI-assisted and agent-authored code becomes a larger part of our systems. You do not need to have solved every aspect of the agentic SDLC already, but you should be actively exploring the space and capable of turning emerging practices into reliable engineering systems.
You will partner closely with engineering, data science, tech ops, security, and domain experts across the drug development organization, representing Infrastructure and SRE in cross-functional planning and promoting strong reliability practices throughout the company.
This position is ideal for a manager who leads from the front: someone who is passionate about developing engineers, sets an urgent, high bar for the team's pace and quality, and is restless about finding the next thing that's slowing the org down before it becomes a blocker. Your experience with engineering management, technical leadership, and infrastructure operations will be instrumental in driving Formation Bio's mission to bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently.
Responsibilities
- Hire, coach, and develop a team of infrastructure and site reliability engineers, including setting goals, delivering feedback, and managing performance.
- Set the technical direction and roadmap for infrastructure and SRE, prioritizing work across reliability, security, cost, and developer experience in partnership with engineering leadership. Build operating practices and paved paths that allow the team to meet the pace required by the broader organization without compromising reliability or security.
- Partner with engineers and data scientists to develop and deploy secure, observable, and reliable software across containerized applications, internal tools, ML pipelines, and AI model training workloads, including software developed with AI-assisted and agentic workflows. Ensure your team designs solutions that fill gaps and sees them through from concept to implementation.
- Oversee the research, development, and maintenance of infrastructure services spanning multiple cloud providers and operating environments, including compute, load balancers, databases, and secrets management across development, staging, and production, as well as infrastructure that supports validated and GxP-relevant workloads.
- Ensure the team creates, reviews, maintains, and optimizes IaC, container images, and CI/CD pipelines, and holds a high bar for engineering quality.
- Review and provide feedback on requirements and design documents as well as operating and maintenance procedures, and ensure documentation and knowledge sharing practices stay strong across the team.
- Drive knowledge sharing, training, and mentoring on infrastructure and SRE fundamentals throughout the organization.
- Own the team's support rotation coverage including staffing, escalation paths, and incident retrospectives.
- Manage team budgeting, resourcing, and reporting for infrastructure initiatives.
About You
- 7+ years of total experience across hands-on infrastructure/SRE work and people management, including 3+ years directly managing Site Reliability, Infrastructure, or DevOps engineers.
- A track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers, with the ability to give direct, actionable feedback and set clear expectations.
- Strong operational and reliability judgment, including experience overseeing advanced diagnostics, incident response, and root cause analyses. Digital forensics is a plus, but not required.
- A strong bias for automation and a low tolerance for repetitive manual work, paired with the judgment to know the rare cases when clickops is the right call and to coach your team accordingly.
- A credible point of view on AI-native engineering and what an agentic SDLC requires operationally, from access and guardrails for agents to how CI/CD and incident response change when agents are writing and shipping code. Able to set a high bar for how AI is used responsibly to accelerate infrastructure development, investigate incidents, perform diagnostics, and make operational improvements.
- Exceptional collaboration and communication skills to effectively engage and work alongside stakeholders from diverse disciplines and varying levels of technical expertise, including engineering leadership and non-technical partners.
- Experience managing or coordinating technical projects and programs, including resource budgeting, estimates, tracking, and reporting.
- Working knowledge of managing workloads in AWS and Snowflake. Experience with Azure, GCP, and/or Vercel is a plus.
- Familiarity with managing multiple shared COTS and FOSS software applications in a multi-tenant environment.
- Working knowledge of Docker, GitHub, Kubernetes, Python, Terraform/OpenTofu, and virtual networking sufficient to guide and evaluate your team's technical decisions.
- Experience supporting regulated or validated workloads is helpful, but not required. We value strong infrastructure leadership, operational judgment, and the ability to learn our regulatory context more than prior pharmaceutical or biotech experience.
Total Compensation Range: $185,500 - $232,000
Compensation Individual compensation is determined by several factors, including role scope, geographic location, and skills & experience. Your offer will reflect where you fall within the range based on these considerations. In addition to base salary, we offer equity, comprehensive benefits, and generous perks. If the posted range doesn't match your expectations, we still encourage you to apply!
Where We Hire Formation Bio is prioritizing hiring in key hubs, primarily the New York City and Boston metro areas, with a hybrid model requiring 3 days per week in office. Applicants from the Research Triangle (NC) and San Francisco Bay Area may also be considered. Please apply only if you reside in these locations or are willing to relocate.
Equal Opportunity Formation Bio is committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome candidates from all backgrounds. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and related medical conditions), gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.
