Behind the scenes at Sano: Building the infrastructure that powers precision medicine
At Sano, every product, pipeline, and participant experience depends on secure, reliable, and scalable infrastructure. That foundation is shaped by our platform engineering team, who work mostly behind the scenes so that everyone else can move faster and more safely.One of the people helping to design and maintain that foundation is Toby Walls, a platform engineer at Sano. We sat down with Toby to explore what his week looks like, how he approaches technical challenges, and the systems that keep Sano running smoothly.
A week in the life: collaboration, structure, and responding to change
Toby’s week balances planned engineering work with pressing needs. The platform team works in two week sprints, but reserves a portion of each one for unexpected requests or incidents. This flexibility helps the team support others without losing sight of long term improvements.
- Most mornings begin with a stand up, followed by deep focus time on architectural work, deployments, pipeline improvements, or internal tooling.
- Throughout the week, Toby meets with teams across Sano through a security sync, Engineering Leadership sessions, and a platform focused “Terraform and Tea,” which is a space to share ideas around infrastructure as code.
- Regular syncs with backend and clinical genetics help ensure that infrastructure evolves alongside scientific and product needs.
- Once a month, Toby travels to work in person with the platform team, which is especially useful for tackling complex architectural questions.
Building the systems Sano relies on
Toby’s work spans several core areas including infrastructure design, security, developer productivity, and internal operations. A significant part of his role involves shaping how Sano’s systems fit together. He creates architecture diagrams that visualize how different services communicate. These help ensure that the entire engineering team understands the structure of the platform and the tradeoffs behind its design.
Once the architecture is defined, Toby helps turn it into real infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code. This approach uses configuration files to create and manage cloud resources in a controlled, repeatable way, rather than relying on manual setup. It allows Sano to keep environments consistent, track changes over time, and quickly spin up or update the systems that power everything from participant portals to data processing pipelines.
On the clinical side, Toby maintains the pipelines bioinformaticians use to deploy code into AWS, ensuring releases follow consistent testing, validation, and security steps. He also contributes to Sano’s Standard Operating Procedures which ensure software used in regulated clinical workflows is fully documented and tested.
Toby’s recent work has centered on making Sano’s platform faster, more secure, and easier for engineers and scientists to build on. While much of this happens behind the scenes, the impact shows up in the speed of new releases, the reliability of our internal tools, and the smooth experience participants have when using our platform.
Recent projects and improvements
Making core services faster and more reliable
One of Toby’s major initiatives has been helping upgrade how several of Sano’s backend services run. These services now operate in an environment that gives the engineering team more control and delivers better performance. As a result:
- Key parts of the platform respond faster
- Systems behave more consistently under load
- Participant and internal user experience feels more seamless
Strengthening how Sano manages and protects data
Toby also improved the way our systems connect to and communicate with databases. These upgrades play a major role in:
- Enhancing data security
- Reducing risk
- Preparing the platform to scale as Sano supports more studies and more complex data flows
This work forms an important part of the foundation that other teams rely on every day.
Helping engineers work faster
Developer productivity is another area where Toby has made a tangible difference. By optimizing how Sano reuses existing build artifacts, he reduced build times for larger services from several minutes to under one minute. This means engineers can:
- Test changes more quickly
- Iterate with less waiting
- Maintain momentum on larger projects
Designing the next generation of clinical data infrastructure
Toby is also contributing to the early architecture for Sano’s future projects. This system will eventually handle some of the most sensitive data at Sano, so getting the foundations right is essential. His work is helping shape a system designed to be secure, compliant, scalable, and flexible enough to support evolving research needs – while navigating challenges and staying motivated.
Navigating challenges and staying motivated
With a broad remit and limited resources, the platform team constantly balances urgent work with longer term initiatives. Toby notes that prioritization is the ongoing challenge, especially when business needs shift. The team focuses on work that reduces risk, unblocks others, or improves the reliability of core systems.
Toby is motivated by solving complex problems and finding solutions that feel both elegant and practical. His long term goal is to continue growing as a platform engineer while contributing to Sano’s mission of making personalized medicine more accessible by reducing friction for developers, improving efficiency, and building resilient systems that support scientific progress.