Staff Software Engineer (Backend) - Toronto

Your work will change lives. Including your own. 

Recursion is a leading, clinical-stage TechBio company decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery. Central to its mission is the Recursion Operating System (OS), a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously expands one of the world’s largest proprietary biological, chemical and patient-centric datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. By commanding massive experimental scale—up to millions of wet lab experiments weekly—and massive computational scale—owning and operating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world—Recursion is uniting technology, biology, chemistry and patient-centric data to advance the future of medicine. Today, Recursion has more than 10 clinical and preclinical programs, 10 advanced discovery programs, and more than 10 partnered programs..

The Impact You’ll Make

• Build production-grade tools and APIs to query petabytes of biological data and AI models. You will play a role in building the tooling that gets our proprietary data and technologies from the lab to our partner-facing apps automatically and efficiently in the context of a production-grade cloud product.
• Create novel infrastructure to support and deliver on industrial-scale clinical trials. Our infrastructure needs to help clinical operations and development teams make accurate traceable decisions to enable advancement of a drug through clinical trials. You will partner with these teams to understand their workflows and regulatory needs. You will be an advisor of buy solutions and focus engineering efforts on unique build solutions that offer world-class data-focused user experiences to help them operate in the most efficient manner possible.
• Lead the way in designing, architecting and implementing the next generation of LLM-enabled software for drug discovery. We believe LLMs are powerful reasoning engines that will drastically change the way companies build and deliver software. You will embrace this paradigm shift and be at the forefront of the large language models revolution. On top of solving the traditional technical challenges of building a product on the cloud, you will be faced with modern technical problems in embedding AI-first and LLM-first features in our platform
• Every Recursion engineer acts as a mentor, coach, and sponsor. You will share your technical knowledge and experiences, increasing learning, growth, and impact within and beyond your team

Location: 

This position is based at one of our offices located in Salt Lake City / Toronto / New York City. Please note that we are a hybrid environment and ask that employees spend 50% of their time in office.

The Team You’ll Join 

This team will build business process workflows and data management systems for clinical-supporting groups at Recursion. These systems will support conversion of documents to interoperable data assets enabling the virtuous feedback loop from discovery to development, while maintaining regulatory and quality compliance. This is an ideal team for someone who isn’t fazed by ambiguity and is eager to tackle challenging issues. It’s a perfect environment for those who adapt easily to change and strive in dynamic situations. If working with peers across different disciplines appeals to you, you’ll fit right in.

As the tech lead of the team you will architect, design, and oversee the implementation of all systems and infrastructure. This role also requires a strong ability to provide mentorship to others.

The Experience You’ll Need:

• Proven experience with cloud-based environments, particularly Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Amazon S3
• Proficiency in infrastructure management tools such as Terraform, Spacelift, and Atlantis
• Experience with orchestration tools like Camunda and Prefect
• Strong knowledge of ETL and Data Transformation processes
• Extensive experience with databases such as BigQuery, SQL, Postgres
• Proficient in Python, with a good foundation in coding best practices. Some experience with R will be beneficial.
• Experience in managing and working with regulatory data is required
• Excellent troubleshooting and problem-solving skills
• A background in biology is not necessary, but intellectual curiosity is a must!

How You’ll be Supported

• Peer mentor assigned for onboarding during first 90 days
• Regular 1:1s with supervisor for support and feedback
• Dedicated sessions to walkthrough services/systems, that you will support
• 1on1 introductions with cross functional peers, that you will partner closely with
• Opportunities to participate in coaching programs

#LI-CP1

At Recursion, we believe that every employee should be compensated fairly. Based on the skill and level of experience required for this role, the estimated current annual base range for this role is:

• Developing: $230,000 CAD
• Skilled: $244,000 CAD 
• Expert: $262,000 CAD

To learn more about our level within levels, click here.

You will also be eligible for bonuses and equity compensation + our comprehensive benefits package for Canada based candidates. The range displayed on each job posting reflects target ranges for Canadian new hire salaries and is determined by job, level, and market factors.  

During the interview selection process, you will connect with a Talent Acquisition Partner who will be your advocate and ally to ensure you receive the appropriate compensation that meets your needs for your skills, experience, and relevant education/training, while also reviewing our very competitive total rewards package.

The Values That We Hope You Share:

• We Care: We care about our drug candidates, our Recursionauts, their families, each other, our communities, the patients we aim to serve and their loved ones. We also care about our work.
• We Learn: Learning from the diverse perspectives of our fellow Recursionauts, and from failure, is an essential part of how we make progress.
• We Deliver: We are unapologetic that our expectations for delivery are extraordinarily high. There is urgency to our existence: we sprint at maximum engagement, making time and space to recover. 
• Act Boldly with Integrity: No company changes the world or reinvents an industry without being bold. It must be balanced; not by timidity, but by doing the right thing even when no one is looking.
• We are One Recursion: We operate with a 'company first, team second' mentality. Our success comes from working as one interdisciplinary team.

Recursion spends time and energy connecting every aspect of work to these values. They aren’t static, but regularly discussed and questioned because we make decisions rooted in those values in our day-to-day work. You can read more about our values and how we live them every day here.

More About Recursion 

Recursion is a clinical stage TechBio company leading the space by decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously expands one of the world’s largest proprietary biological and chemical datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. By commanding massive experimental scale — up to millions of wet lab experiments weekly — and massive computational scale — owning and operating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, Recursion is uniting technology, biology and chemistry to advance the future of medicine.

Recursion is headquartered in Salt Lake City, where it is a founding member of BioHive, the Utah life sciences industry collective. Recursion also has offices in London, Toronto, Montreal and the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at www.Recursion.com, or connect on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.

Recursion is an Equal Opportunity Employer that values diversity and inclusion.  All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, local, or provincial human rights legislation. 

Recursion welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.

Recruitment & Staffing Agencies: Recursion Pharmaceuticals and its affiliate companies do not accept resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Recursion or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Recursion’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Recursion, and Recursion will not owe any referral or other fees. Our team will communicate directly with candidates who are not represented by an agent or intermediary unless otherwise agreed to prior to interviewing for the job.