Base salary: $185,000 to $205,000 USD, with some flexibility for exceptional candidates.
Equity: 0.05% to 0.25% as a founding team member.
This is a founding role at Serova, a fast-moving company that designs personalized mRNA cancer vaccines. You would own the product from end to end, including design, frontend and backend.
What we're looking for
We need someone with 1 to 6 years of full-time engineering experience who has owned a product end to end (frontend and backend), ideally from 0 to 1 at a Seed to Series B startup, and has real product and design taste. You should be comfortable taking loosely defined requests from clinical, wet lab, and operations teams and turning them into polished, useful software without a spec, a designer, or a PM. You should also have a track record of shipping products that non-engineers actually used and judged. Bonus points if you have UI/UX design experience (the ideal profile is close to a design engineer), have built scientific or dense-data UIs like dashboards and visualizations, or were a founder or one of the first 10 employees somewhere.
Anyone can generate code with LLMs now, so what sets people apart is judgment. That means knowing what to build, how it should feel, and how the app should be structured, not just shipping whatever Claude produces. Years of experience matter less than the work itself. A strong portfolio, personal site, or well-thought-out side project counts for a lot. You don't need a biology or oncology background, but you should be curious and pick things up fast.
What you'll do
Build Serova's first patient- and clinician-facing product. This means turning the data Serova already produces internally (antigen prediction, vaccine design, case status) into a clear, opinionated interface where patients and doctors can see results and manage their case.
Rebuild the existing scientific dashboard from scratch. Today it explains the vaccine design process to clinical teams and patients. You'll own its UX, visual design, and implementation, and give it a much more opinionated design.
Work closely with the clinical, wet lab, manufacturing, and engineering teams to understand their workflows and design the best UX for each one.
Build internal tools and front-end services that coordinate operations, such as who can access which patient data, email follow-ups, and processes with manufacturing and CRO partners. All of these run on one shared database.
Lead new product surfaces from concept to production across the full stack (Postgres, Python, React/TypeScript), making sound architecture decisions along the way.
Keep improving and extending Serova's internal systems to support operational excellence as the company grows from about a dozen patients to many more, and expands beyond the US to Australia and Europe.
Note: This is a founding role. Today, an engineer on the team covers these product surfaces part-time. You'll be the first person fully dedicated to them, and you'll shape both the product and engineering culture.
Serova (also known as SerovaBio) is a personalized cancer vaccine company. It designs an mRNA vaccine for each patient, built from that person's own blood and tumor samples. Serova started at the end of 2024 and moved quickly. It built a pipeline that aims for best-in-class prediction of which antigens should go into a vaccine, and it set up manufacturing with several CRO partners. It has already made vaccines for about a dozen people. It recently received its first FDA clearance to dose a patient.
Mission: Serova wants to give patients who have run out of standard treatment options a real new option, and over time to make personalized cancer vaccines a possible cure, either alongside standard care or on their own. For now it works through the FDA's expanded access (single-patient IND) pathway. This route is much faster than a traditional clinical trial and lets Serova help patients who need options now.
What it does: Serova aims to handle the whole patient journey under one roof:
- First contact and checking whether a patient is eligible
- Vaccine design and manufacturing
- Case managers who guide each patient
- Dosing through a growing network of partner doctors
- Later, its own clinic, likely in Montana
Culture: Serova is ambitious and moves fast. In the CEO's words, it is "revolutionizing health care" from an outsider's angle. The team values people who take on problems head-on without fixed ideas about how things "should" work. The patient comes first: Serova wants every patient and family to feel heard, supported and well cared for. The company is US-focused for now. It is making inroads in Australia and hopes to reach Europe next year, with the goal of becoming a global company.
Serova is a small, fast-moving team spread across the UK and San Francisco. Leaders include CEO Matt, who is closely involved in hiring; Chief of Staff James; a UK-based CMO; a CSO; and Alicia, Director of Clinical Development. A new Head of Clinical Partnerships is joining in San Francisco to lead the US patient case management team. The San Francisco lab team improves the antigen prediction models and analyzes patient samples to look for signs that the vaccine is working.
What it's like to work here:
- Early and high-impact: Early hires help build processes from scratch and set the tone for everyone who joins later.
- Mission-driven: The work directly affects patients and families who have few other options. Compassion, discretion and sensitivity are central to the job.
- Outsider mindset: Serova prefers people who are eager to learn and tackle problems without fixed habits over people set in "the way things are done."
- Supportive structure: There are clear routes to take questions to the CSO, CMO and medical team, so no one has to have every answer.
- Room to grow: Serova plans to grow quickly. Early team members can go on to train and manage new hires.
- Collaborative and flexible: Office time helps build culture and relationships. The UK office is very flexible, and Serova expects the US to become similar over time.
Serova's product is a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, delivered as a full service from start to finish. Serova takes a patient's blood and, where possible, tumor samples. Its own antigen-prediction pipeline then picks which tumor antigens go into a vaccine made only for that person. The vaccines use a lipid nanoparticle (LNP) formulation that already has safety data; only the antigens change from patient to patient. They are made through partner CROs. For now, patients get the vaccine through the FDA's expanded access (single-patient IND) pathway, which gives a yes or no within 30 days. This serves patients who have run out of standard options. The service covers: an eligibility check based on the patient's existing data, help getting more data if needed, vaccine design and manufacturing, a dedicated patient case manager who guides each patient and family, and dosing through the patient's own doctor or Serova's growing clinical network. Serova also plans to open its own clinic, likely in Montana, so it can give doses in a more controlled setting. Its San Francisco lab analyzes patient samples to look for signs that the vaccine is working.