Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Platform and Execution Model)

Red Cell Partners
Seattle +2 more
Remote

Who this role is best for

A natural match if you have experience with distributed systems and workflow orchestration in regulated environments.

Best fit for

  • Candidates with 8+ years in distributed systems and a track record in regulated environments
    — “8+ years of experience building distributed/platform systems”
  • Individuals who have led architecture decisions and mentored engineers across teams
    — “Staff-level candidates will be expected to lead architecture across teams”
  • Engineers with deep knowledge of durable execution and mission-critical runtime systems
    — “4+ years owning mission-critical runtimes or workflow/orchestration systems”

Things to consider

  • Commitment to working in regulated environments with high assurance requirements
    — “Comfortable operating in regulated or high-assurance environments”
  • Need for experience in designing systems that maintain correctness under failure conditions
    — “correctness must be preserved across retries, restarts, and partial execution”

How to stand out

  • Highlight experience with durable execution models like state machines and sagas
    — “Deep expertise with durable execution (e.g., state machines, event sourcing, saga/compensation)”
  • Showcase work with observability tools and cross-service trace correlation
    — “Hands-on with observability (Grafana or equivalent), including trace correlation across async boundaries”
  • Demonstrate leadership in defining platform architecture and engineering standards
    — “lead architecture across teams, establish engineering standards, and mentor other engineers”
  • Emphasize work with security and governance in production systems
    — “Proven track record with security & governance in production systems”
  • Demonstrate ability to build reusable platform primitives and avoid tight coupling
    — “Poor abstractions create tight coupling across services”
Pace · Fast PacedCollaboration · HighAutonomy · HighDecision Impact · Team

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • designing and implementing clean abstractions
  • ensuring correctness and determinism in workflow execution
  • translating product requirements into coherent platform architecture
Typical background
background in software engineeringexperience in distributed systems

Skills & requirements

Required

Distributed SystemsPlatform PrimitivesReliabilityScalabilityCorrectnessArchitecture

Preferred

AICybersecurityNational Security

Stack & domain

Distributed SystemsPlatform PrimitivesReliabilityScalabilityCorrectnessArchitectureMentorshipAIHealthcareCyberNational Security

About the role

Original posting from Red Cell Partners via Greenhouse

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

If you want to be on the cutting edge of technology, building AI solutions for the future, and are up for a challenge, let’s talk!

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 with strong performance as 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.

Applicant Data Disclosure   

By submitting an application, you acknowledge that Red Cell Partners, LLC ("Red Cell") uses third-party service providers to facilitate its recruitment and hiring processes. These providers include applicant tracking systems, candidate verification platforms, and fraud detection tools (collectively, "Hiring Platforms"). Your application materials, including your résumé, cover letter, work samples, responses to application questions, and any other information you submit, may be transmitted to and processed by these Hiring Platforms for the following purposes:  

Managing and administering your application throughout the hiring process; 

Verifying the accuracy and authenticity of application materials, including by cross-referencing information you provide against publicly available sources and proprietary databases; 

Identifying indicators of potentially fraudulent, fabricated, or materially misleading application content, including but not limited to discrepancies between submitted materials and publicly available professional profiles, geographic anomalies, and fabricated work histories. 

Applications that are flagged through this process as containing indicators of fraud or material misrepresentation may be declined from further consideration. If you have questions about the status of your application or the evaluation process, please contact talent@redcellpartners.com.  

Red Cell requires its Hiring Platform providers to process your information solely for the purposes described above and in accordance with applicable law. Your information will be retained only for as long as necessary to fulfill these purposes and any applicable legal obligations, after which it will be deleted in accordance with Red Cell's data retention policies.

For more information about how your data is used, please refer to our Privacy Policy and Applicant Privacy Notice.  

Source: Red Cell Partners careers (Greenhouse)

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