Associate Director, Full-Stack Engineer, Commercial

About the role

Celldex is building a commercial insights platform used by its field, brand, medical and market access teams to make decisions at launch and for years afterward. You will be the first engineering hire, making the architectural decisions, standing up the infrastructure, building the backend and services, and owning deployment, security and release. The role is permanent and long-lived, with the first production release targeted within six months of the team forming. It is based in Hampton, New Jersey, four days per week on site.

Key responsibilities

• Make foundational architecture decisions: hosting, application framework, reading from the Databricks warehouse, authentication and authorization, environments and release process.
• Deliver the first vertical slice end to end, from warehouse to API to authenticated web page and chart, deployed, logged and access-controlled.
• Build backend services exposing governed data and summaries to the interface layer.
• Own the cloud environment: provision, secure, monitor and defend it to IT and information security teams.
• Own engineering practice: repository structure, code review, testing, CI/CD, documentation, dependency and secrets management.
• Run the platform: monitoring, alerting, incident response, performance, cost and upgrades.
• Build product surfaces with the Design Engineer, writing front-end code.
• Productionize the AI layer (prompting, retrieval and evaluation logic designed in Python) so it runs reliably, observably and within cost.
• Work with AI-assisted development tools as part of the job.

Required profile

• BS in computer science, software engineering or a related quantitative discipline with 8+ years shipping production web apps, including at least two where you were lead or sole architect; or MS/PhD with 5+ years.
• At least one substantial system built from nothing, and a system owned in production over time.
• Experience with regulated or high-consequence data such as healthcare, financial services or insurance.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development (e.g. Claude Code, GitHub Copilot).
• Able to work directly with non-engineers and turn requirements into specifications.

Required skills

• Strong full-stack: modern typed backend and component-based front-end.
• Cloud infrastructure ownership, ideally Azure: compute, networking, managed databases, IaC, CI/CD.
• Security: identity and access management, network isolation, encryption, secrets management, audit logging.
• Data literacy: SQL against a cloud data warehouse, understanding query cost and cohort definitions.
• Nice to have: pharmaceutical or life sciences commercial experience, Databricks or Snowflake, LLM-backed features, data visualization, early startup or vendor experience.

What we offer

• Expected base salary of $153,616 to $199,501.
• Annual discretionary bonus, long-term incentive, 401(k) with employer contribution.
• Health care and other insurance benefits for employee and family, paid holidays, vacation and sick days.