Member of Technical Staff - Design Engineer

Valthos • New York, NY

9d • Onsite

About The Position

Valthos Inc. is an applied biological intelligence company focused on safeguarding humanity through software and biological AI systems. We leverage AI architectures similar to those used in self-driving cars and rocket science for biological design, adapting to nature's evolving mutational landscape. Our team comprises mission-driven software engineers from Palantir and biological ML engineers from MIT's Broad Institute and DeepMind, making computational biology advancements accessible for federal and commercial use. The core challenge is not just finding biological signals but enabling users to understand, trust, and act upon them in uncertain, complex environments. Users need to move from raw data to defensible answers regarding biological threats, understanding what changed, why it matters, the strength of evidence, uncertainties, and next steps. Design at Valthos is crucial for clarifying this path without oversimplifying the science or ignoring uncertainty. Design engineers define the platform's functionality and user experience from the ground up, bridging product design and frontend engineering. This involves close collaboration with computational biologists, engineers, business development, and users on evolving workflows. Projects progress from sketches to coded prototypes to production software, with designers and engineers working hand-in-hand. The ideal candidate possesses strong taste, curiosity for complex domains, technical skills to implement ideas, and the thoughtfulness to simplify without losing critical detail. They are adept at identifying misleading visualizations, overly burdensome workflows, or screens that fail to build trust. This role offers significant ownership over the product's visual language, interaction patterns, and design foundations, with the opportunity to build serious software that is genuinely good to use.

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience owning both the design and frontend implementation of production-quality web applications, from early exploration through shipped product
• Strong product and design judgment across interaction, information, and visual design, with the ability to create clear hierarchy, thoughtful flows, and polished interfaces for complex or information-dense software
• Demonstrated ability to translate technical, ambiguous, or unfamiliar workflows into understandable software without removing the detail users need to make good decisions
• Strong frontend engineering skills, especially with React, TypeScript, modern CSS, and component-based application architecture
• Fluency moving between sketches, Figma, coded prototypes, and production implementation, with good judgment about the right level of fidelity for the problem
• Systems thinking across design and engineering, with an emphasis on reusable interaction patterns, coherent product structure, maintainable components, and a consistent design language
• Demonstrated ability to learn quickly, work independently, make reasonable tradeoffs, and carry an unclear problem through to a shipped solution
• Strong communication skills, especially around design rationale, product tradeoffs, and implementation decisions
• Comfort working on sensitive biological and national-security problems with discretion and good judgment

Nice To Haves

• Experience designing analytical, scientific, developer, operational, or other data-rich software
• Experience building data visualizations, maps, timelines, graphs, or other visual representations beyond conventional dashboards
• Experience creating or evolving a design system and its corresponding component library
• Experience using AI-assisted design and development tools to accelerate exploration, prototyping, and implementation, with the judgment to evaluate, refine, and take responsibility for the result
• Experience working in an early-stage product environment with evolving requirements and close contact with users
• Background in or exposure to computational biology, bioinformatics, biodefense, or national security

Responsibilities

• Own the design and frontend implementation of core product experiences, from early user flows and prototypes through production-ready interfaces
• Work directly with users, founders, engineers, and computational biologists to understand complex operational and scientific workflows and translate them into clear, usable software
• Design and build interfaces for data exploration, analytical workflows, alerts, review processes, and decision support, preserving the evidence and context users need to evaluate the result and determine what to do next
• Rapidly prototype new product concepts for user research, pilots, demos, and customer discovery, and refine them through feedback and observations
• Establish and evolve the visual language, interaction patterns, design system, and component foundations that keep the product coherent as it grows
• Bring strong product judgment to decisions across information architecture, data visualization, interaction design, and frontend architecture
• Improve the clarity, credibility, and usability of the product across onboarding, navigation, workflow execution, results interpretation, and review

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed