Staff Software Engineer (Product + Platform Development)

Red Cell Partners • Seattle, VA

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in rapidly scalable technology-led companies in healthcare, cyber, and national security. Trase Systems, co-founded in 2023, offers an AI platform that simplifies AI deployment, management, and optimization for enterprises, focusing on bridging the "last mile" of AI adoption. The Staff Software Engineer role involves splitting time between building the core product and delivering it directly to customers. This position requires embedding with customer teams to understand their workflows and use cases, building production-ready systems, and feeding field learnings back into the core product to shape platform capabilities and roadmap. The role demands moving quickly from discovery to deployment while maintaining engineering discipline for secure and regulated environments. It is a hands-on, senior engineering role responsible for setting technical direction, making key architecture decisions, and improving engineering practices, while still actively coding, debugging, and working in customer environments. The ideal candidate can translate vague requirements into concrete technical plans and communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong foundation in building and shipping production-quality systems.
• Ability to apply AI and ML techniques, including LLM-based approaches such as RAG, guardrails, and evals, to real customer problems.
• Scalable system design experience, ensuring solutions scale reliably as usage, data, and complexity grow.
• Experience with backend engineering, distributed systems, APIs, data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, or applied AI/ML systems.
• Comfort working across the full stack when needed, including backend services, frontend interfaces, infrastructure, integrations, and deployment workflows.
• Ability to operate in ambiguous customer environments and turn unclear requirements into working software.
• Strong technical communication skills with engineers, product teams, executives, and customer stakeholders.
• High ownership, bias for action, and ability to drive outcomes without waiting for perfect requirements.
• Strong debugging instincts and ability to reason across application code, data, infrastructure, networking, and customer systems.

Nice To Haves

• Prior experience as a full-stack or backend software engineer, forward deployed engineer, solutions engineer, product engineer, platform engineer, or founding/startup engineer.
• Experience with AI agents, LLM applications, workflow orchestration, evals, guardrails, retrieval systems, or model deployment.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, CI/CD, observability, and secure deployment practices.
• Familiarity with identity and access management, audit logging, data governance, and secure software delivery.
• Experience building in environments with compliance, security, or operational constraints.
• Comfort working in secure or regulated customer environments.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with customers to understand their workflows, pain points, data environments, and operational constraints.
• Contribute to both the core platform and customer-specific integrations: build reusable capabilities into the product, then adapt and deploy them in each customer's environment.
• Build and deploy AI-enabled applications, agents, and workflow automation, applying AI/ML and LLM techniques such as RAG, guardrails, and evals to deliver reliable customer solutions.
• Translate customer needs into technical requirements, implementation plans, and product feedback for the core engineering team.
• Own delivery from prototype through production, including architecture, backend services, APIs, integrations, observability, testing, deployment, and customer acceptance.
• Integrate with customer systems, data sources, identity providers, and cloud or on-prem infrastructure.
• Partner with product, engineering, security, and customer teams to ensure solutions are secure, reliable, auditable, and operationally useful.
• Debug issues in deployed environments and drive fast resolution across application, infrastructure, data, and integration layers.
• Operate with strong judgment in environments involving sensitive data and business-critical workflows.

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

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