Founding Engineer

Valius Sciences•San Francisco, CA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Valius is building a diagnostics and bioinformatics company focused on comprehensive DNA, RNA, and protein assessments to help patients and care teams understand tumors and identify potential therapeutic vulnerabilities. The company is expanding its patient volume and bringing new diagnostic modalities and analytical approaches into clinical care. The Founding Engineer will build Valius’s technical foundation, working directly with the founders and science team to define and develop infrastructure and products for molecular insights. The role spans the full stack: developing AI-powered interfaces for patients, care teams, and scientists; owning architecture and tooling for internal and external applications; and partnering with computational biologists on data pipelines that process patient molecular data. The engineer will make foundational decisions about system design and engineering practices, with the opportunity to move into leadership or supervisory roles as the company grows. The position is expected to work from Valius’s San Francisco office four days a week.

Requirements

At least 5 years of professional software engineering experience.
Strong full-stack foundation, with particular depth in back-end systems, data infrastructure, and cloud architecture; experience with Python, FastAPI, AWS or GCP, and data pipelines; and front-end experience with React, TypeScript, and Tailwind.
Experience making architectural decisions.
Track record of taking ownership and shipping features end to end.
Strong product instincts and ability to work with non-engineering stakeholders to shape roadmaps.
Strong communication skills.
Excitement about working in a fast-moving, early-stage environment where the scope of the role will evolve.
Experience in or exposure to life sciences, genomics, bioinformatics, or a related field.
Commitment to Valius’s patient-focused mission.

Nice To Haves

Experience as an early engineer or founding engineer at a startup.
Experience mentoring engineers or acting as a tech lead.
Background in data engineering or working with large datasets.
Experience integrating AI features in production applications.
Interest in growing into an engineering leadership role as the company scales.

Responsibilities

Partner with the founding team and science team to set the technical vision and roadmap for internal and external applications.
Make and implement decisions about system design, cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, and security and compliance posture.
Build and maintain systems that reliably ingest, process, and manage patient molecular data.
Design and develop AI-powered interfaces that make complex molecular data accessible and actionable for patients, clinicians, and scientists.
Work with computational biologists to build tools that speed up their work.
Write clean, well-tested code and set standards for codebase reliability and maintainability.
Contribute to cross-functional initiatives and bring an engineering perspective to company-level decisions.