Principal Software Engineer - Variant Knowledge Platform

Labcorp is a global leader in diagnostic testing and drug development solutions, helping healthcare providers, researchers, and patients make informed decisions that advance care. In this role, the Principal Software Engineer will shape and build the Variant Knowledge Platform, owning technical problems end to end, defining architectures and API contracts, and driving cross-team initiatives to ensure the accuracy and reliability of variant data.

Responsibilities:

• Own the technical design for large, ambiguous, open-ended problems that span the Variant Knowledge Platform and the broader interpretation stack, where there is no clear off-the-shelf solution
• Define and evolve the data models for variant identity, classification, and annotation, holding a high bar for correctness and consistency. Identity or schema drift in this domain can corrupt classifications platform-wide
• Design production-grade, versioned REST API contracts, secured via the platform's identity provider (Okta), that internal consumers and enterprise clients integrate against, including versioning, deprecation, and governance strategies
• Lead the evolution of the systems that turn raw bioinformatic data into trustworthy variant- and sample-level information, and the pipelines that source, maintain, and serve variant annotations, toward real-time, multi-tenant operation
• Drive the architecture for automating evidence placement and classification, and for scaling the storage and retrieval of sample- and variant-level data as volume and client count grow
• Define org-wide system architectures and rally engineers and stakeholders around them through clear rational, written design documents, and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs)
• Lead cross-team technical programs as a named principal-level lead, coordinating design, sequencing, and delivery across platform, boundary/tenancy, and curation teams, and represent the platform in the Architecture Review Forum
• Set the strategy for system operability: testing, observability (including multi-tenant observability), health monitoring, reliability, and on-call practices under a “you build it, you run it” model
• Lead large-scale data migration and backfill efforts, such as consolidating legacy interpretation data into VKB, with the rigor, staging, and validation gates such work demands
• Shape the platform's role in enabling future test content and assay development through its data and services
• Mentor and level up engineers across multiple teams through technical guidance, design review, and role-modeling, multiplying the org's overall engineering capability
• Partner with cross-functional stakeholders across product, curation science, and clinical to identify business opportunities enabled by the platform and align technical strategy to them
• Communicate technical vision and trade-offs clearly to audiences ranging from individual engineers to executives, securing buy-in for direction-setting decisions

Requirements:

• Bachelor's Degree
• Five or more years of experience in REST API and contract design, including versioning and depreciation strategy and secure service-to-service authentication (e.g., Okta-based identity)
• Two or more years of experience designing and operating cloud-based services on AWS
• Five or more years of experience in a primary backend programming language used for data-intensive services (e.g., Python)
• One or more years of experience in genomics or bioinformatics, such as variant interpretation, clinical genetics, HGVS/variant nomenclature, gene/transcript annotation, or evidence-based classification
• Two or more years of experience with event-driven and asynchronous messaging architectures (e.g., AWS SQS) and building clean REST gateways in front of them
• One or more years of experience working in a regulated or clinical environment, including version pinning and validation needs driven by regulatory requirements