Sr Staff Platform Engineer / Team Lead

Inari is the SEEDesign™ company. We embrace the diversity and complexity of nature in every aspect of our business to drive innovation – to push the boundaries of what is possible. Through our unrivaled technology platform, Inari uses predictive design and advanced multiplex gene editing to develop step-change products. We are taking a nature positive approach to unlock the full potential of seeds that will transform the food system. The results will lead to more productive acres delivering value creation for farmers and a more sustainable future for our planet.

Our success is dependent on great minds, collaborating to generate bright ideas and deliver exceptional outcomes. We have 200 employees, with research sites in Cambridge, MA (USA) and Ghent (Belgium), as well as a product development site in West Lafayette, IN (USA). We’ve deliberately built a team that brings diversity of thought to all aspects of our business, to generate new ideas, approaches, and ways of operating. And we've intentionally combined experience with potential, bringing agriculture industry experts with the desire to innovate together with bright minds from academia, human therapeutics, software, and consulting.

About the role

The Opportunity: Inari is transforming agriculture through predictive design and AI - and the platform powering that mission matters enormously. We're looking for a platform architect who will be a key technical leader and force multiplier on our Data, AI, and Engineering team. This role is for someone who loves the architecture whiteboard, the messy integration problem, the well-designed API, and the occasional "why is this thing broken in prod?" mystery. You'll drive platform architecture to help build and scale the technical foundation that powers internal applications, tools, data workflows, and AI systems that our scientists and engineers rely on every day to advance our predictive design engine and product pipelines. This role may be located in Cambridge, MA or West Lafayette, IN.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture and development of key software systems, platform components, pipelines, and services within Inari's Data & AI Platform.
• Build and mature core platform foundations, including authentication and authorization patterns, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and reusable deployment frameworks.
• Enable teams to host internal applications, run workflows, expose APIs, use shared services, and build on a stronger engineering platform.
• Build and support infrastructure for modern AI-enabled systems, including agentic workflows, MCPs, model-adjacent services, and internal AI platform capabilities.
• Drive tighter integration across software engineering, data engineering, AI/ML, and scientific computing platforms, shaping a cohesive architecture across AWS, Kubernetes/EKS, Airflow, Databricks, SageMaker, Quilt/S3, Python, and related services.
• Serve as a senior technical voice across engineering, helping drive architecture decisions, technical standards, platform strategy, and platform-first thinking.
• Partner closely with the Director of AI & Data Engineering to set technical direction, identify platform priorities, and represent engineering platform needs in leadership discussions.
• Act as the technical lead for a small, high-impact team of engineers, setting technical direction, reviewing designs and code, and raising the bar on engineering practice.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, systems engineering, data engineering, or related technical roles.
• 2+ years of experience in technical leadership or leading engineering projects.
• Strong hands-on experience designing and building platform or systems architecture, especially in data, AI, or scientific computing environments.
• Proficiency in Python and practical experience with AWS, Kubernetes, serverless architecture, and container-based infrastructure.
• Experience building and integrating complex systems such as APIs, orchestration frameworks, data pipelines, workflow platforms, internal tools, or AI/ML infrastructure.
• Ability to influence technical direction beyond your immediate team.
• Clear communication skills, with the ability to translate technical tradeoffs for engineering, product, science, and leadership audiences.
• A bias toward building practical, reusable, scalable systems that teams can actually use and operate.

Skills

• Experience with MCPs or similar AI agent integration frameworks.
• Familiarity with Airflow, Databricks, SageMaker, EKS, Quilt, MLflow, or related data and AI platform tooling.
• Experience building internal developer platforms, shared engineering services, or platform capabilities for multiple teams.
• Background in life sciences, agriculture, AgTech, biotech, or another domain where data and AI are central to scientific work.
• Experience supporting production-grade AI, ML, RAG, agentic, or model-serving systems.

Why You'll Love This Role

• Build the platform behind the science. Turn scientists' big ideas into infrastructure that actually ships.
• Play in a rare technical sandbox. AI, biology, data, cloud, APIs, MCPs. Boring isn't on the menu.
• Untangle the knots. Apps, pipelines, AI workflows, and scientific systems that grew independently and apart. You get them working together.
• Build for people who'll push the limits. Scientists and engineers need real horsepower, not a toy.
• Leave your fingerprints on what Inari builds next. Your platform decisions become the defaults everyone else builds on.

Pay

The salary range for this position is $169,800 - $233,400. Inari provides three different components of pay – base, short-term incentive, and long-term equity along with a one-time new hire stock option grant.

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits package including both a Preferred Provider Network (PPO) and High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP) with a company-funded health savings account (HSA), vision, dental, and several flexible spending accounts (FSA).
• Host of voluntary benefits and a robust wellness program.
• 401k plan with company matching.
• Flexible paid time off policy.