Tech Lead, Tetra Apps Platform

Who We Are

TetraScience is the Scientific Data and AI company building Tetra OS, the operating system for scientific intelligence. We help the world's leading life sciences firms turn fragmented scientific data into AI-native assets and scientific workflows that accelerate discovery, development, and manufacturing. TetraScience's growing ecosystem of strategic partners includes NVIDIA, Databricks, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Snowflake, Google, and Microsoft.

In connection with your candidacy, you will be asked to carefully review the Tetra Way letter, authored directly by Patrick Grady, our co-founder and CEO. This letter is designed to assist you in better understanding whether TetraScience is the right fit for you from a values and ethos perspective. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this document and you are encouraged to take it literally and reflect on whether you are aligned with our unique approach to company and team building. If you join us, you will be expected to embody its contents each day.

The Role

The Tetra Apps platform is how scientists, partners, and TetraScience teams build and run containerized applications on Tetra OS. The platform owns except the app itself - packaging and templates, provisioning, routing, identity and authorization boundaries, observability, upgrades, and the developer experience that ties it all together.

We are hiring the Tech Lead for this platform. This is a technical lead-level individual contributor seat, not a people-management role. You will be the technical design authority for the Tetra Apps runtime, own sprint and quarterly planning for the team alongside your product partner, and be accountable for what the team commits to, ships, and and operates in production. You will work with the team who own apps infrastructure today, supporting teams in adjacent areas like DevOps and security, and with the product and field teams whose work runs through the platform.

You will inherit a production platform with business value, tech debt, and future needs. You will keep that system running, make incremental improvements, and steer it toward an architecture that holds for years. 

This platform is the product. Today, customer developers build apps on general-purpose platforms and call Tetra through its API; Tetra Apps inherit harmonized scientific data (with a common data model, labels, and lineage) and Tetra identity and governance, with no second app-hosting platform to secure and validate. You will make that the easiest path for every builder.

What You Will Do

• Own the technical architecture of the Tetra Apps platform: how applications are developed, packaged, provisioned, routed, authenticated, isolated, observed, upgraded, and retired.
• App runtime. Design and evolve the app proxy and routing layer, container provisioning and lifecycle on ECS, per-app identities (service accounts, IAM roles, database credentials), and the install, upgrade, and rollback paths that must work in both multitenant cloud and customer-hosted environments.
• App security and governance. Design security into the platform: tenant and per-user data boundaries; delegated authorization so apps act within each viewer's data policies, secrets handling, browser security, and server-side enforcement of approval and install gates. Build in audit trails, version approval and trusted publishing, so an app in a regulated environment only needs to validate its own behavior. Threat-model a platform that runs external code, including agents.
• App ops. Own production readiness: metrics and tracing for apps, SLIs and SLOs, alerting, incident runbooks, capacity and cost planning. Partner with DevOps and other platform teams on infrastructure-as-code and multi-tenant deployment.
• App developer experience. Own the templates, SDKs (TypeScript and Python), CLI, local development loop, and documentation that builders use. Make the correct, secure path the fast path and vice versa.
• Plan and deliver. Run sprint and quarterly planning with the product manager: scope, estimate, sequence, and hold the line on commitments. Weigh platform investments by their impact on builders and scientists, using adoption and usage data. Make maintenance and tech-debt paydown visible in the plan and lead ROI discussions.
• Be the design authority. Lead design reviews, write architecture RFCs and decision records, represent the platform in the weekly architecture review, and raise the bar for the engineers around you through review and pairing.
• Stay full stack. Ship code and components across TypeScript/Node.js services, React web apps, AWS architecture, client SDKs, and IAC / CI/CD and automation.
• Product judgment: you treat governance, developer experience, and scale as product features measured against the alternatives builders could choose, not as infrastructure chores.
• Support the field directly. Help field engineers and customers build and debug apps in their environments, and turn what you learn into platform improvements.

Requirements

• 10+ years of professional software engineering, including time as the technical lead or architect of a platform that external teams build on.
• Shipped and operated a multi-tenant application platform, app hosting/runtime, PaaS, plugin or extension system, or internal developer platform in production with external users.
• Deep, hands-on container experience: Docker image pipelines, ECS or similar task and service definitions, networking, service discovery, scaling, and cost.
• Security engineering as a first-class skill: IAM and least privilege, identity propagation, tenant isolation, browser security, secret management. You have secured multi-tenant systems for running untrusted code.
• Adapted to the AI step change in software development - you ship faster with fewer bugs and avoid both the “no AI” and “waterfall of slop” pitfalls, and you help your team and builders on your platform do the same
• The judgment to successfully apply AI to production software generation while maintaining correctness, security, and architectural fit.
• Strong production experience with AWS: ECS, ALB/NLB, VPC, IAM, KMS, CloudWatch, S3, Lambda. Infrastructure-as-code with CloudFormation or an equivalent.
• Full-stack fluency: expert TypeScript/Node.js for backend services and APIs; solid React, ideally with module federation or micro-frontend experience; working Python for SDKs and tooling.
• Demonstrated API-first design: REST and OpenAPI, versioning, backward compatibility, and clear error contracts.
• Observability skills: OpenTelemetry, SLI/SLO definition, distributed tracing.
• Run sprint and quarterly planning for a team, written design docs and migration plans that got followed, and held engineers to commitments through both influence and authority.
• Operated, extended and improved messy, live production systems without breaking existing customers

Nice to Have

• Module federation or micro-frontend architectures and app shells.
• Artifact registries and package management: publishing, versioning, promotion.
• Regulated or validated environments (GxP, 21 CFR Part 11, SOC 2) and audit readiness.
• Operating software in both vendor-hosted (multi-tenant) and customer-hosted (single-tenant) deployments.

This Is Not the Right Role If You

• Are primarily a manager. This is a hands-on staff IC seat; your leverage will be technical and by example. As Tetra grows, there are opportunities here.
• Have a background in only infrastructure without application-layer and product judgment, or application-level development with infrastructure and security handled elsewhere. As platform builders we need both.
• Are looking for a greenfield project. This platform is live in production and has proven its value. Change has to be made safely and the lights kept on.

Benefits

• 100% employer-paid benefits for all eligible employees and immediate family members
• Unlimited paid time off (PTO)
• 401K
• Flexible working arrangements — remote work
• Company-paid Life Insurance, LTD/STD
• A culture of continuous improvement where you can grow your career and get coaching

The salary range for this position is $200K–$270K USD. The salary range posted reflects our target baseline for this role. Final compensation is determined by a thorough evaluation of factors including the candidate's specific experience, localized market data, and internal team equity.

We are not currently providing visa sponsorship for this position.