VP Data & Engineering

About Sano

Mission: Accelerating the world’s transition to personalised medicine.

Purpose: To speed up development of life‑saving treatments for those with limited options.

Vision: Become the world’s best source of patient-in-the-loop genomic and health data for precision medicine development.

Role Overview:

As VP of Engineering & Data, you’ll be a hands‑on, strategic leader for a small high‑impact team. You’ll own the technical direction and delivery for our engineering function, including front‑end, backend, and platform disciplines. You will be instrumental in ensuring we can reliably ingest, curate, and serve high‑quality multi‑modal datasets (genomics + health/clinical + patient‑reported) and turn them into products that accelerate precision medicine trials, and make it easier for patients and families to take part.

This is a “player‑coach” leadership role: you’ll set direction, manage/build the team, while still being close enough to the work to provide guidance and make great technical/business decisions quickly.

How you’ll make an impact:

• Own the engineering + data strategy: set a clear technical vision and architecture that supports Sano’s product and commercial goals, balancing speed, quality, and long‑term scalability.
• Build and evolve our multi‑modal data platform: design and deliver pipelines that ingest, standardise, validate, and serve data across modalities.
• Make data “product‑grade”: establish a high bar for data quality, provenance/lineage, versioning, reproducibility, and observability.
• Turn data into customer value: partner closely with Product to build data‑powered workflows and surfaces.
• Lead the team: hire, coach, and retain a high‑performing group of engineers and data specialists.
• Strengthen engineering fundamentals: drive architectural coherence, security‑by‑design, reliability, and a strong SDLC.
• Embed privacy, consent, and security into everything: ensure our systems meet the expectations that come with sensitive health and genomic data.
• Be a cross‑functional multiplier: work tightly with the SVP of Product and the broader Leadership Team.
• Scale with intention: take accountability for sprint planning, prioritisation, metrics, decision‑making frameworks.

This job is for you if you:

• Have led engineering teams in small, fast‑moving environments.
• Have deep hands‑on experience designing and operating production systems.
• Have built and shipped data platforms and data products.
• Understand multi‑source data integration.
• Can operate comfortably with ambiguity, set direction, and make sound decisions.
• Communicate clearly and directly, especially in a remote‑first environment.
• Care deeply about building technology that impacts patients’ lives.

Must have experience:

• Building and operating production‑grade data pipelines.
• Data quality + governance foundations.
• Delivering data‑powered user‑facing or partner‑facing products.
• Designing systems for sensitive data.
• Leading teams with high autonomy.

Even better if you have:

• Experience in genomics, precision medicine, clinical research, or healthcare data GxP environments.
• Familiarity with healthcare data standards.
• Experience building consent‑aware data systems.
• Experience with security/compliance programmes.
• Experience with modern data stacks.
• Experience building ML/AI use cases in production.

This role is unlikely to be a great match if:

• You prefer leading large organisations with narrow scopes.
• You want to focus only on people management or only on technical work.
• You’re uncomfortable making trade‑offs and moving quickly in ambiguity.
• You don’t enjoy close collaboration with Product.

Research shows that some people are less likely to apply for a role unless they are 100% qualified. Your experience, skills and passion will set you apart so tell us about your achievements, irrespective of whether they are personal or work‑related.

If this role excites you, don't let our role description hold you back, get applying!

Hiring Process:

• Initial culture fit call with the CEO.
• 60 min technical interview with 3 members of the engineering team.
• 60 min interview with VP product & Delivery.
• Panel working session: discuss how you would approach solving real challenges.

Support: If you have a medical condition or an individual need for an adjustment to our process, please let us know.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging: At Sano, we're committed to creating an environment that promotes diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.