Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Platform and Execution Model)

Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Platform and Execution Model)

Seattle, WA (Preferred) or McLean, VA or Remote (USA)

About Us

Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in rapidly scalable technology-led companies that are bringing revolutionary advancements to market in three distinct practice areas: healthcare, cyber, and national security. United by a shared sense of duty and deep belief in the power of innovation, Red Cell is developing powerful tools and solutions to address our Nation’s most pressing problems.

About Trase

Co-founded in 2023 by Joe Laws and Grant Verstandig , Trase Systems is AI, Uncomplicated. Trase empowers enterprise leaders to harness the full potential of AI without the associated complexity and risks. We are an end-to‑end solution for deploying, managing, and optimizing AI in the enterprise. Our platform specializes in bridging the “last mile” of AI adoption, unlocking AI's full potential while driving efficiency and significant cost savings. Trase is at the forefront of AI Agent innovation, topping the Hugging Face GAIA Leaderboard for Generalized AI Assistants, ahead of industry giants such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI. We are leveraging our cutting‑edge technologies to develop mission‑critical agentic applications in complex industries such as Healthcare, Oil & Gas, and National Security.

About The Role

As a Senior or Staff Software Engineer, you'll build and own critical parts of Trase OS, the shared platform that powers Trase deployments in regulated environments. You'll work on the distributed systems and platform primitives connecting workflows, agents, tools, and product surfaces, with a particular focus on reliability, scalability, and correctness.

You'll take on technically ambiguous problems, design solutions, and drive them through production. This is a hands‑on engineering role for someone who is comfortable going deep on distributed systems while helping other engineers make sound architectural decisions.

Clean abstractions and correctness‑under‑failure are critical because we operate long‑lived agents in healthcare/defense environments where auditability and reliability are non‑negotiable.

The level will reflect your experience and demonstrated scope. Staff‑level candidates will be expected to lead architecture across teams, establish engineering standards, and mentor other engineers.

Why This Role is Needed

Trase OS is an orchestration‑heavy system coordinating long‑lived workflows, agents, and tools across multiple services and environments.

As the platform evolves, the primary risks shift from implementation to system design quality:

• Poor abstractions create tight coupling across services
• Workflow execution becomes difficult to reason about under failure
• Platform capabilities fragment instead of becoming reusable primitives
• Scaling introduces complexity instead of leverage

This role exists to:

• Design and implement clean, durable abstractions for the platform execution model
• Ensure correctness and determinism in workflow execution
• Translate evolving product requirements into coherent platform architecture
• Enable teams to build on Trase OS without introducing systemic complexity

What Makes This Role Challenging

• You are designing systems where failure is the norm, not the exception, and correctness must be preserved across retries, restarts, and partial execution
• You must balance clean abstractions with real‑world constraints (performance, security, multi‑tenant environments)
• Decisions made here become foundational primitives used across all products and teams
• The system must remain understandable and auditable, even as complexity and scale increase

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own critical components of the core execution model (state machine, lifecycle, resource model, failure semantics)
• Build reliable distributed systems that behave predictably across retries, restarts, partial failures, and concurrent execution.
• Develop platform APIs/SDKs connecting workflows, agents, tools, and product surfaces; drive versioning & compatibility
• Guarantee correctness via idempotency, deterministic replays, compensating actions, and data integrity
• Engineer reliability at scale: concurrency controls, rate limits, backpressure, sharding/partitioning, and workload isolation
• Build security & governance into the core: RBAC/ABAC, policy enforcement, fine‑grained audit & lineage
• Deliver observability: distributed tracing, structured logs, metrics, and evaluation hooks; build an “explainable trail” of agent actions
• Own quality: design reviews, test strategy (unit, property, chaos), performance baselines, SLOs, incident response, and postmortems
• Mentor engineers, contribute to design reviews, and help establish strong engineering patterns across the platform.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience building distributed/platform systems, including significant experience defining architecture across teams or domains
• 4+ years owning mission‑critical runtimes or workflow/orchestration systems
• Deep expertise with durable execution (e.g., state machines, event sourcing, saga/compensation, idempotency, exactly/at‑least‑once semantics)
• Proven track record with security & governance in production systems (auth, RBAC, audit, policy)
• Hands‑on with observability (Grafana or equivalent), including trace correlation across async boundaries
• Strong systems design across storage, queues, schedulers, and evented architectures; performance tuning under load
• Excellence in a modern language (e.g., Go, Rust, Java, or TypeScript) and cloud‑native stacks (containers, CI/CD, IaC)
• Comfortable operating in regulated or high‑assurance environments; bias toward correctness, clarity, and documentation
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to influence design decisions within a team and across closely related engineering areas.
• Ability to incorporate advance LLM capabilities into system design and platform architecture decisions where appropriate

Nice to Have

• Prior work on workflow engines (Temporal/Cadence/AWS Step Functions, Argo, Airflow) or serverless runtimes
• Experience with policy engines (OPA), secrets/KMS, or data‑handling controls (PII/PHI)
• ML/LLM evaluation frameworks, tool/plugin architectures, or embedding model governance into execution
• Government or healthcare experience (HIPAA, audit readiness) and multi‑tenant isolation

Salary Range: $180,000-240,000. This represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience, skills, and other factors.

Some travel to customers may be required.

Our Red Cell Partners Benefits (may differ for each incubation):

For full-time roles

• Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement withstrong performanceas the firm grows
• 100% employer paid, comprehensive health care including medical, dental, and vision for you and your family.
• Paid maternity and paternity for 14 weeks at employees' normal pay.
• Unlimited PTO, with management approval.
• Opportunities for professional development and continued learning.
• Optional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives available.
• Mental health benefits are available through Tara Mind .
• Cost effective GLP-1 solutions available through Crux .

We’re an Equal Opportunity Employer: You’ll receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or on the basis of disability.