Phylo - Member of Technical Staff - System Engineering

deCircle; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

deCircle is seeking an engineer to design and implement core systems for its agentic AI platform. This role involves building production systems, ensuring reliable cloud-native infrastructure, and developing secure execution environments. The ideal candidate has over 3 years of experience in backend or distributed systems engineering, strong skills in languages like Python, and familiarity with Kubernetes and cloud services. The position requires a proactive approach in a fast-paced environment, contributing significantly to the company's direction.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of industry experience in backend, infrastructure, or distributed systems engineering.
• Strong proficiency in at least one programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, or similar).
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems in production.
• Deep hands-on experience with containerization and Kubernetes.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tooling.
• Experience operating systems on at least one major cloud provider.

Responsibilities

• Design and build production systems that orchestrate agent execution.
• Build and operate scalable, reliable infrastructure across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments.
• Develop systems for sandboxed execution and implement security foundations.
• Partner closely with ML and science teams.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Containerization

Kubernetes

Infrastructure as code

Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)

Python

Tools

Terraform

Pulumi

Job description

Phylo is an applied research lab building agentic intelligence to accelerate discovery for every biomedical scientist. We believe AI agents will fundamentally transform how biomedical research is done, enabling faster and more systematic scientific progress.

Our growing team brings together world class researchers and engineers across AI and biology. Backed by a $13.5M seed round led by a16z, Menlo Ventures and Anthropic, and advised by Nobel Prize laureate and pioneering biologists, Phylo is building the next generation of AI systems for the life sciences.

About the role

We’re looking for an engineer to build and operate the core systems that power Phylo’s agentic AI platform in production. You’ll design and implement the distributed systems, compute environments, and service architecture that allow our AI agents to run reliably at scale — across cloud-native deployments and enterprise environments.

This is an early, foundational role on the team, with real ownership over core infrastructure decisions, a high degree of autonomy, and the ability to meaningfully shape the company’s direction from day one.

We are an AI-native engineering team: we use coding agents heavily, move fast, and hold a very high bar for engineering excellence.

What You’ll Work On

• Design and build production systems that orchestrate agent execution and power AI-driven scientific workloads.

• Build and operate scalable, reliable infrastructure across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem enterprise environments.

• Develop systems for sandboxed execution, secure task isolation, and controlled compute environments. Design and implement security, access control, and compliance foundations suitable for enterprise deployments.

• Partner closely with ML and science teams to translate computational workflows into robust, production-grade distributed systems.

• 3+ years of industry experience in backend, infrastructure, or distributed systems engineering.

• Strong proficiency in at least one programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, or similar).

• Experience designing and operating distributed systems in production.

• Deep hands-on experience with containerization and Kubernetes.

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tooling (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi, or equivalent).

• Experience operating systems on at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

• Comfort owning systems end-to-end in fast-moving, high-autonomy environments.

Nice to Haves

• Experience building enterprise SaaS platform that supports single-tenant, customer hosted deployment patterns.

• Experience in building R&D infrastructure at Pharma/Biotech.

• Experience with job orchestration, task scheduling, or workflow engines.

• Experience with sandboxed or isolated execution frameworks (e.g., gVisor, Kata Containers, Firecracker).

• Familiarity with distributed storage, observability systems, or high-performance compute environments.