Staff Software Engineer | Core Platform

Manifold AI•Cambridge, MA

1d•$170,000 - $220,000

About The Position

Manifold is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the Core Platform team. This is a small, senior group responsible for the foundational services that power Manifold's data, compute, and workflow capabilities. As a Staff Engineer on the Core team, you will have the opportunity to work on compute infrastructure, workflow orchestration, data pipelines, platform APIs, and MCP services. You will be supporting active enterprise users (and their AI agents) who are analyzing genomics and life sciences datasets at scale. This is a hands-on, individual contributor role. We are also looking for individuals who demonstrate a strong sense of ownership and are experienced enough to help shape our longer-term product architecture. These core services play a critical role in Manifold's success and help our customers bring life-changing medicines to patients faster.

Requirements

8+ years of enterprise software experience, with a meaningful portion spent on backend, infrastructure-adjacent, or distributed systems work.
You've owned complex, scalable, production systems and can share plenty of real-world stories.
Mastery of Python and deep infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) experience.
Experience managing compute environments on AWS (EC2, ECS, Batch, or equivalent) including autoscaling and cost / performance tradeoffs.
Comfortable supporting a broad technical surface area. You know how to orient quickly in an unfamiliar codebase or system.
Operational ownership mindset. You care about what happens in production, you build for observability from the start, and you close the loop on incidents with durable fixes.
You've genuinely integrated AI tools into your engineering workflow and have concrete examples of how that changed your output. You're not just curious about this space, you're building in it.
You've done your homework on what it means to accelerate life sciences research and you can articulate why that mission matters to you.

Nice To Haves

Bioinformatics workflow experience a plus (specifically WDL, Nextflow, or Cromwell).
General Life sciences or other regulated-industry experience also a plus.

Responsibilities

Help design, build and operate Manifold’s compute and workflow orchestration services.
Develop extensible and durable solutions for AMI management, autoscaling, custom runtime environments, 3rd party tool support, etc.
Work closely with SRE team to improve reliability and observability of Manifold core services.
Establish operational standards, alerting, and run-books that move the team from reactive firefighting to proactive ownership.
Be a technical multiplier. Mentor engineers, drive technical decisions through clearly written artifacts, and bring a cross-cutting perspective that improves the team's collective output.
Partner with Product, Forward Deployed Engineers, and account teams to translate bespoke enterprise requirements into durable platform capabilities.
Fully understand customers’ most pressing problems and validate end-to-end solutions.
Contribute to Manifold’s AI-native platform vision.
Spot AI industry trends before they happen, and have informed opinions about how they potentially benefit life sciences research.