VP, Software Engineering

Vice President, Software Engineering

Location: US or India. Remote.

Reports to: Chief Technology Officer

Who are we?

Velsera is the precision engine company. We build the software researchers, scientists and clinicians use to drive precision R&D and bring analytics closer to the point of care. Seven Bridges, Pierian and UgenTec came together to form Velsera; we are headquartered in Boston, MA, with [current headcount] colleagues across [current country count] countries.

Our engineering organization spans three product lines. The Seven Bridges Platform is our research genomics platform — roughly 130 containerized services, multi-cloud, running in both commercial and FedRAMP Moderate environments, where scientists run CWL, WDL and Nextflow workflows over petabyte-scale genomic data. The Clinical Genomics Workspace and our clinical Knowledgebase turn genomic findings into clinically actionable interpretation. FastFinder supports diagnostic laboratories in Europe. Three regulatory envelopes, one engineering organization.

What each product needs next is different. Seven Bridges is building federated data management, compliance as a product capability, and governed AI as its differentiators. The clinical and diagnostic products need engineering fundamentals first — reliability, modernization and predictable release — and will use AI mainly to make our own work faster rather than as a headline feature.

Reporting line and scope

You report to the CTO and own architecture, delivery and the engineering organization for all of Velsera's products — the Seven Bridges Platform, the Clinical Genomics Workspace and Knowledgebase, and FastFinder. Most of the team is in India, with a smaller group in Serbia; you lead across both sites and work daily with stakeholders in other time zones. You hold architecture authority across all three product lines, co-own boundary decisions with our security, federal compliance and quality leadership, and partner with a cross-business Principal AI Engineer for depth that spans them. You own production operations as well as delivery: reliability, cost, technical debt, observability, and a modernization program already in flight.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role: roughly 30% hands-on technical work, 70% organizational leadership. Hands-on means owning the architecture decisions of record, leading design and architecture reviews, reviewing code and infrastructure changes, and writing code and prototypes where needed. You will not be the busiest committer on the team, but you must hold your own in any design review here and be credible to your most senior engineers.

What will you do?

• Run three product lines as one engineering organization: predictable delivery, documented service ownership, and a single technical bar across all of them. Different regulatory profiles, one set of engineering standards.

• Get the delivery path governed and modern: infrastructure-as-code under CI with plan review and policy-as-code, short-lived credentials, progressive rollout, and change evidence that stands up to audit inside a federally authorized environment.

• Own reliability as a product attribute: SLOs and error budgets on the paths customers actually depend on, on-call design that works across two sites, and the discipline to turn repeat incidents into architectural change.

• Lead Seven Bridges on its three pillars — federated data management, compliance as a product capability, and governed AI.

• Modernize the clinical and diagnostic products on their fundamentals: bring a large regulated legacy codebase forward without breaking validation, hold European data residency, and lift Knowledgebase release reliability and throughput using AI.

• Apply AI to how we build, where it pays: spec-driven design, AI-augmented code review, CI/CD triage, incident copilots — each under a governance policy co-owned with Risk & Compliance, and each measured.

• Build and hold the team: management depth you can trust with delivery, the specialist capability the roadmap needs, and retention in an organization that has seen a lot of change.

How we operate

Velsera runs on six operating principles. They are our execution engine — the reason the strategy holds even when a specific call proves wrong — and they are how this role will be judged.

• We deliver outcomes that matter to our customers. Shipped capability in a customer's hands, not position on a roadmap.

• We all own it together. Nothing gets thrown over a boundary — not to product, not to quality, not to another product line's team.

• We decide fast and learn faster, even in ambiguity. Reversible decisions get made in the room. Irreversible ones get evidence first.

• Trust is everything, we earn the right to win. In regulated markets trust is the product, and a compliance shortcut spends it.

• We lead and shape precision medicine. We set the bar for how AI is done safely on biomedical data rather than following someone else's lead.

• We build the best team in the industry. The engineers you hire, grow and keep are the strategy.

Requirements

What do you bring to the table?

Must have

1. 15+ years in software engineering, with a decade or more leading multi-team organizations through managers.

2. Distributed-systems and platform architecture ownership at scale — multi-tenant isolation, service decomposition, polyglot legacy pragmatism, and the judgment to reduce complexity.

3. Delivery inside a genuine regulatory boundary — FedRAMP, HIPAA, ISO 13485/IVDR, GxP or equivalent — where a mis-scoped change is a compliance event

4. Reliability and cost leadership: SLOs, error budgets, on-call design, blameless postmortems, and the discipline to convert repeat incidents into architectural change.

5. Modern delivery engineering: infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD with short-lived credentials, policy-as-code, artifact provenance, progressive rollout.

6. Ownership of engineering across more than one product with different regulatory profiles, and the judgment to share a platform layer where it pays and separate where it does not.

7. Credible technical leadership of AI work in a regulated setting — production AI/LLM systems shipped under a real compliance regime, or AI-assisted engineering you landed, governed and measured. Not pilots, and not slideware.

Bachelor's degree in a relevant field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Genomics or bioinformatics depth: CWL/WDL/Nextflow, GA4GH and DRS, FHIR or OMOP, federated researcher identity.

• Federated or cross-institutional data access at scale — bringing analysis to data held by someone else.

• Clinical or diagnostic software under a quality management system (ISO 13485, IEC 62304, IVDR) and the SaMD boundary judgment that comes with it.

• Federal program delivery and artifact literacy — authorization packages, significant-change requests, corrective-action plans.

• Architecture depth in inference topology: hosting modality trade-offs, retrieval that inherits per-tenant authorization, eval harnesses, guardrails, and observability of model calls.

• Regulated legacy modernization at scale.

• Shipping reusable product capability out of grant- or program-funded work.

Competencies

Technical Depth

Sustained personal command of the technology the organization is built on, sufficient to shape and challenge its most consequential decisions.

• reads code, designs and test results first-hand rather than relying on summaries

• changes a team's technical direction with argument and evidence, not only authority

• is treated as a peer by senior engineers in design review

• notices when the market bar has moved and adjusts the technical plan before being told to

Customer Focus

Keeping the customer's outcome as the measure of engineering success, and staying close enough to their work to know what that outcome is.

• spends time with real customers and their workflows rather than relying on requirement summaries

• frames prioritization calls in terms of customer outcome, not internal convenience

• is credible in front of customers, funders and auditors when the conversation is difficult

• treats an escalation as information about the system rather than an interruption to delivery

Managing

The ability to lead and develop others so they perform at their best — setting direction, providing the means, and holding the bar.

• builds a management layer capable of running delivery without them, then holds it accountable

• gives teams real decision rights and defends them upward

• makes hiring and performance decisions promptly and explains them plainly

• rebuilds confidence and momentum in an organization that has been through churn

Focus on Quality

Setting high standards and treating quality, security and compliance as design constraints rather than gates to be cleared.

• designs for auditability, traceability and reproducibility from the outset

• converts recurring incidents into architectural and process change

• builds working credit with quality, regulatory and security partners before needing it

• declines shortcuts that would trade a compliance position for a delivery date

Decision Quality Under Ambiguity

The ability to make timely, defensible decisions on incomplete information, and to revisit them without drama when the evidence changes.

• commits to a sequence when the data is partial, and states what would change their mind

• separates reversible from irreversible decisions and spends attention accordingly

• records the reasoning, not only the outcome

• reverses a decision openly when it turns out to be wrong

Velsera is an Equal Opportunity Employer

Velsera is proud to be an equal opportunity employer committed to providing employment opportunity regardless of sex, race, creed, color, gender, religion, marital status, domestic partner status, age, national origin or ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, sexual orientation, pregnancy, military or veteran status, citizenship status, and genetic information.