Geared toward experienced distributed systems engineers comfortable with designing durable execution models, with a focus on regulated environments and platform-level architecture. Remote work is possible but preferred locations are Seattle and McLean, and the role demands leadership in system design and mentorship.
Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.
Original posting from Trase Systems via Greenhouse
About Us
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 Trase Benefits:
For full-time roles only
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.
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.
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