VP Data & Engineering

🧬 About Sano

Mission: what we do

• Accelerating the world’s transition to personalised medicine

Purpose: why we do it

• To speed up development of life-saving treatments for those with limited options

Vision: where we’re going

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

👉 Curious to dive deeper? Read more about what we do here

Brief into to the role, who they are reporting to,...

Headlines:

• Role - VP Data & Engineering

• Salary -£120,000 to £150,000 depending on experience

• Location - UK (remote only)

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 (e.g., genomics, EMR/clinical data, genetic testing lab results, patient-reported outcomes, study operations and/or site data, device/wearable data, unstructured data like documents/notes).

• Make data “product-grade” : establish a high bar for data quality, provenance/lineage, versioning, reproducibility, and observability, so customers and regulators can trust what we deliver.

• Turn data into customer value : partner closely with Product to build data-powered workflows and surfaces (APIs, internal tools, partner-ready datasets/exports, analytics capabilities, cohort discovery, operational insights) that improve study outcomes and patient experience.

• Lead the team : hire, coach, and retain a high-performing group of engineers and data specialists; create clear ownership, pragmatic processes, and an environment where people do the best work of their careers.

• Strengthen engineering fundamentals : drive architectural coherence, security-by-design, reliability, and a strong SDLC (testing, CI/CD, code review standards, documentation, incident response, on-call expectations appropriate to our size).

• Embed privacy, consent, and security into everything : ensure our systems meet the expectations that come with sensitive health and genomic data, and partner with internal stakeholders on governance and risk.

• Be a cross-functional multiplier : work tightly with the SVP of Product (and the broader Leadership Team as well as Sano’s Product team) to make great trade-offs, communicate clearly, and deliver outcomes
  

• Scale with intention : take accountability for sprint planning, prioritisation, metrics, decision-making frameworks, to increase throughput and predictability without creating bureaucracy.

This job is for you if you:

• Have led engineering teams in small, fast-moving environments where you had to be both strategic and highly execution-oriented.

• Have deep hands-on experience designing and operating production systems, and can still dive into architecture, reviews, and the hardest technical problems when needed.

• Have built and shipped data platforms and data products, where data integrity, auditability, and customer outcomes mattered.

• Understand multi-source data integration including entity resolution, schema evolution, data schema/ontologies, validation rules, backfills, and tooling to keep pipelines reliable over time.

• Can operate comfortably with ambiguity, set direction, and make sound decisions with incomplete information.

• Communicate clearly and directly, especially in a remote-first environment, with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  

• Care deeply about building technology that impacts patients’ lives, and take patient trust seriously.

Must have experience:

• Building and operating production-grade data pipelines, including orchestration, monitoring, alerting, and reliable backfills.

• Data quality + governance foundations: validation, lineage/provenance, access controls, versioning, and clear definitions of “source of truth.”

• Delivering data-powered user-facing or partner-facing products, such as APIs, dataset delivery mechanisms, analytics surfaces, or workflow tools driven by integrated datasets.

• Designing systems for sensitive data (health/PII/PHI): secure-by-default architecture, least-privilege access, strong operational discipline, and a pragmatic approach to compliance.
  

• Leading teams with high autonomy: hiring, coaching, setting expectations, and creating a culture of ownership and delivery .

Even better if you have:

• Experience in genomics, precision medicine, clinical research, or healthcare data GxP environments.

• Familiarity with healthcare data standards or common models (e.g., FHIR/HL7, OMOP), and/or experience working with unstructured clinical documents and extraction/normalisation workflows.

• Experience building consent-aware data systems (where permissions and data usage constraints are first-class).

• Experience with security/compliance programmes (e.g., SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / similar), including partnering on audits and implementing realistic and balanced controls

• Experience with modern data stacks (warehouse/lakehouse), data quality frameworks, and strong opinions about what to keep simple at a startup.

• Experience building ML/AI use cases in production, incorporating multi-modal data in a regulated and high-trust environment like healthcare

This role is unlikely to be a great match if:

• You prefer leading large organisations with narrow scopes and lots of established processes. This role is hands-on and broad and requires agility.

• You want to focus only on people management or only on technical work - we need a leader who can do both and can model excellence

• You’re uncomfortable making trade-offs and moving quickly in ambiguity, or you need very detailed direction to do your best work.
  

• You don’t enjoy close collaboration with Product, including shaping priorities and saying “no” (or “not yet”) when needed.

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, tell us about your journey, and about what you learnt.

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

🔍 Hiring Process

1. 📞 Initial culture fit call with the CEO

2. 🙌 60 min interview with VP product & Delivery

3. 💡 60 min technical interview with 3 members of the engineering team

4. ⭐️ Panel working session: We’ll share 1–2 real challenges we’re currently facing (with relevant context such as roadmap, product architecture, and commercial materials) and ask you to discuss how you would approach solving them over the next 3, 6, and 12 months in an interactive session with the panel.

5. Final stage interview with external tech advisor Ott Kaukver.

   Support - If you have a medical condition or an individual need for an adjustment to our process, and you believe this may affect your ability to be at your best - please let us know so we can talk about how we can best support you and make any adjustments that may be needed. All interviews at Sano take place virtually. Please let us know if we can help make a virtual interview run smoother for you.

🛑 Please note:

We can only accept applications from those eligible to live and work in the UK or in the USA (for specific roles). We are unable to sponsor visas for this position.

🌈 Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging

At Sano, we're committed to creating an environment that promotes diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. We are a global community and we believe our unique qualities should be celebrated as they are critical to our innovation. It's essential to us that you bring your authentic self to work every single day, no matter your age, ethnicity, religion, citizenship, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, caring responsibilities, neurodiversity, or otherwise. Inclusion isn't just an initiative at Sano. We strive to embed it not just into our values but throughout our entire culture.