Team Lead, Platform Services

Our talented multidisciplinary team has expertise across data science, machine learning, medicine, and biology.

We are a community of diverse people bringing our energy and skills to find the right treatment for every patient. Our culture is expressed through our values of curiosity, care, collaboration, and creativity.

Owkin is an AI company on a mission to solve the complexity of biology. It is building the first Biology Super Intelligence (BASI) by combining powerful biological large language models, multimodal patient data, and agentic software. At the heart of this system is Owkin K, an AI copilot and its new LLM fine‑tuned on biology called Owkin Zero, used by researchers, clinicians, and drug developers to better understand biology, validate scientific hypotheses, and deliver better diagnostics and therapies faster.

Position is based in our Paris office or remotely in France, UK, Germany.

Please submit your CV in English.

About the role:

As a Team Lead, Platform Services in the Platform Services team at Owkin, you will be at the heart of our mission to accelerate data‑driven biomedical discoveries at scale. You will contribute to building and maintaining interface layers between products and infrastructure on cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP). In this role you will build and operate systems supporting complex biomedical research and business intelligence use cases across their full lifecycle while maintaining the highest standards of privacy, security and compliance.

In particular, you will:

• Design, implement, and maintain cloud‑based infrastructure and services at the intersection of agentic AI and biomedical data.
• Contribute to the design and evolution of our product architecture across a number of use cases of scalable scientific computing, data processing and AI engineering.
• Collaborate with software engineers, data engineers, researchers and data scientists to understand their needs and implement solutions that enhance their productivity.
• Support and improve our CI/CD pipelines, development workflows, and security practices.
• Participate in incident response to ensure high availability and reliability.
• Contribute to maintaining the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data, and our products.
• Improve the modularity and the performance of our solution.
• Improve the observability of the stack and increase its resiliency.
• Contribute to and improve our development tooling and processes.
• Act as a primary point of contact for internal stakeholders (software and data engineers, researchers, data scientists, and product teams), translating their needs into actionable platform solutions that enhance their productivity.
• Manage up effectively in the organization, ensuring leadership has the right context, visibility, and confidence in the team's direction and delivery.
• Navigate and manage multiple conflicting priorities simultaneously, making clear trade‑off decisions and driving alignment across teams and business units.
• Identify bottlenecks in cross‑team workflows and proactively design and implement solutions to resolve them.
• Build and lead a high‑performing platform engineering team, setting a high bar for technical excellence, ownership, and accountability in the organization.
• Thrive in delivering individual results while ensuring the team consistently meets its commitments — leading from the front, not just from the top.
• Coach, mentor, and develop team members through regular feedback, career development conversations, and hands‑on technical guidance.
• Direct impact on K Pro users & Owkin products, and other Owkin customers through enhanced performance and feature delivery.
• Help create a user‑friendly environment for bioinformaticians, data scientists and researchers, accelerating their work through streamlined data access, efficient processing and seamless project collaboration.
• Strengthen Owkin’s data network with academic partners by enabling them to share their data securely and easily.
• Amplify the productivity of Owkin developers as part of a platform services team working on transversal platform features.

This role offers the opportunity to work at the intersection of AI engineering with biomedical research and clinical development while developing a highly skilled professional software engineering team.

About you

More than a list of requirements, we are looking for a skilled individual with a “can do” mindset, able to mobilize their experience to deliver value as part of a team. Autonomy in learning and delivering is valued as much as being able to embrace the culture and processes.

Required

• 8+ years of software engineering experience from a leading tech/AI startup or scale up, with proven experience managing and leading an internationally distributed engineering team.
• Proven ability to manage up, manage conflicting priorities, and drive alignment in complex, fast‑moving environments with multiple stakeholders.
• Track record of delivering individual technical results while simultaneously developing the people around them.
• Driving software engineering productivity with AI tooling (e.g. Claude Code) as an individual contributor or manager.
• Experience with either Python or Golang.
• Management of cloud infrastructure as code (AWS, Azure or GCP), using Terraform and Kubernetes.
• Strong experience in Docker.
• Experience in architectural design of complex systems, especially for complex data at scale.
• Demonstrated attention to quality and software engineering processes, including observability and security: we run what we build.
• Full professional proficiency in English.
• Demonstrated ability to work cross‑functionally with non‑engineering stakeholders and translate complex technical trade‑offs into clear communication.

Preferred qualifications / bonus skills

• Familiarity with scientific or biomedical use cases (research and application)
• Experience in AI and agentic AI applications
• Experience in Data Engineering
• Experience with MLOps practices
• Frontend skills
• Knowledge in healthcare or biomedical domains, or work experience from regulated environments

What we offer

• Friendly and informal working environment
• Opportunity to work with an international team with high technical and scientific backgrounds
• Flexible working options – office, hybrid and remote options to suit personal and business needs.
• Experience the world – work from anywhere in the world for up to four weeks per year, subject to approval.
• 35 days vacation plus public holidays – wherever you are based.
• Minimum of 16 weeks paid parental leave for primary caregivers and eight weeks for secondary caregivers, regardless of gender.
• Private healthcare coverage, tailored to your country.
• High‑performance workspaces with distinctive personality to accommodate the intellectual and creative potential of Owkin’s team.

Owkin is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, age, color, religion, national origin, protected veteran status or on the basis of disability.