VP, Engineering

Founded in 2009, DNAnexus is the enterprise orchestration platform for precision health. A pioneer in cloud-based omics and purpose-built bioinformatics for life sciences, DNAnexus helps customers contextualize, orchestrate, and federate multiomic and real-world data to derive actionable insights and accelerate the journey from sequence to scientific breakthrough. DNAnexus accomplishes this through its compliance-first, AI-enabled platform, equipped to handle extreme scale and complex data processing for genomics, multiomics, and beyond. For more information, visit www.dnanexus.com. 

Role Overview

This is a VP-level position reporting directly to the CTO. You will lead Engineering pods — the foundational platform teams powering our Agentic AI and Big Data capabilities. Your immediate mandate is to build the management layer across four existing pods (~30 people today) and scale the organization to 60–80 engineers over the next few years.

What You Will Lead

• Engineering Pods: The engineering foundation for our Agentic AI and petascale Big Data platform
• Team scale-up: Grow from ~30 engineers across 4 pods to 60–80 people, building the management structure as you go
• Global team: A Prague-centered organization with team members also in Vietnam and the US

Responsibilities

• Establish and scale the leadership infrastructure for four cross-functional engineering pods; identify, mentor, and elevate high-potential talent into formal leadership roles
• Scale the organization from ~30 to 60–80 engineers through strategic hiring, onboarding, and team design
• Define a long-term technical vision for platform foundations that meet scalability, security, and engineering productivity goals; own the roadmap and deliver against it
• Be present in the work: sit with engineers during technical incidents, mediate architectural decisions, and stay close to the code and systems
• Drive cross-functional collaboration with Product Management and other engineering teams to build core platform components
• Bridge Czech Republic and the US (East & West Coast): maintain strong alignment with US-based stakeholders
• Champion engineering culture in our Czech Republic hub — mentor leaders, raise the bar on quality, and foster a high-performance, high-trust environment
• Establish best practices around agile delivery, automated testing, CI/CD, and continuous process improvement

Required

• 15+ years of software product development experience, including 7+ years managing (software and data) engineering teams and 3+ years as a manager of managers (total org size of 40+)
• Proven track record scaling engineering organizations from ~30 to 80+ people, including designing the management structure
• Deep expertise in petascale data processing and storage — you can speak authoritatively about distributed data platforms at scale
• Experience with building agentic platforms and understanding the impact on data platform requirements
• Able to articulate how AI acts as a force multiplier in engineering productivity and product capability, with demonstrated experience
• Experience with greenfield platform development — building foundational systems from scratch, not just iterating on existing ones
• Background in a highly regulated industry (financial services, defense, healthcare, life sciences, etc.) with a strong appreciation for compliance, security, and data governance
• Solid cloud architecture knowledge (AWS preferred; Azure/GCP/OCI considered); hands-on comfort with distributed systems, REST APIs, and SQL/NoSQL databases
• Comfortable working in a distributed, remote-first environment with asynchronous communication across time zones
• Located in or able to work in Central European Time, with flexibility to join evening calls (~8 p.m. CET) several times per week

Nice to Have

• Healthcare or life sciences industry experience
• Familiarity with JavaScript, Node.js, or Python

What We Care About

• Curiosity and humility. We are dedicated to learning and constantly improving. We value “unknown unknowns” and a natural drive to figure out how everything works.
• Agility and ownership. Our teams have a high degree of freedom in how they build, but they own what they deliver — for the long run.
• Proactivity. An internal drive to leave things in a better state than you found them. Going above and beyond to keep the codebase healthy.
• Monitoring and automation. A fully automated system is key to rapid iteration; an extensive metrics suite surfaces what needs attention.
• Balancing research and product. We value staying current on cutting-edge research while shipping meaningful products that enable researchers to fulfill their mission.

Logistics

• Location: Prague, Czech Republic (preferred) or remote within the Czech Republic — candidates in the vicinity of Prague are expected to be in the office at least 2 days per week; candidates based further from Prague are expected to be in the office at least one week per month.
• Headquarters: Mountain View, California, USA
• Team footprint: Prague (primary), Vietnam, United States
• Time zone: Central European Time; occasional evening availability (~8 p.m. CET) required for West Coast US alignment

Based in Mountain View, California, DNAnexus is experiencing rapid growth and is searching for the best talent to join our team. We recently completed a $200 million financing round to advance our growth globally to further serve leading healthcare and life science organizations. Key investors include Google Ventures, Perceptive Advisors, Northpond Ventures, TPG Biotech, and Foresite Capital. 

DNAnexus will provide the necessary support to enable the ideal candidate to work remotely within the Czech Republic.