Staff Software Engineer (Product + Platform Development)

Red Cell Partners; McLean, Seattle (VA, WA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Career track opportunity

Health care (family)

Paid maternity/paternity leave

Unlimited PTO

Professional development

401K / Equity incentives

Mental health benefits

GLP-1 solutions

Job summary

Red Cell Partners is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to split time between core product development and direct customer delivery. You’ll shape architecture, write production code, and drive platform capabilities while serving client environments.

You will embed with customer teams to understand workflows and deliver AI-enabled solutions, feeding field learnings back into the product roadmap for faster, repeat deployments.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience including production systems.
• Ability to apply AI/ML techniques, including LLM-based approaches, to real problems.
• Experience designing scalable systems that grow with usage and data.
• Experience with backend engineering, distributed systems, APIs, data pipelines, cloud infra, or applied AI/ML.
• Comfort across full stack when needed (backend, frontend, infra, integrations).
• Ability to operate in ambiguous environments and translate requirements into working software.
• Strong technical communication with engineers, product teams, executives, and customers.
• High ownership, bias for action, driving outcomes with minimal guidance.
• Strong debugging across code, data, infra, networking, and customer systems.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with customers to understand workflows, pain points, data environments, and constraints.
• Contribute to core platform and customer-specific integrations; build reusable capabilities.
• Build and deploy AI-enabled apps, agents, and workflow automation using AI/ML techniques.
• Translate customer needs into technical requirements and product feedback for the core team.
• Own delivery from prototype to production, including architecture, APIs, integrations, testing, and deployment.
• Integrate with customer systems, data sources, identity providers, and cloud or on-prem infra.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, security, and customer teams to ensure secure, auditable solutions.
• Debug issues in deployed environments and drive fast resolution across layers.
• Operate with judgment in environments handling sensitive data and critical workflows.

Skills

Software engineering

AI/ML techniques

LLMs

Distributed systems

Backend development

Full-stack familiarity

Technical communication

Ownership / initiative

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

Docker

CI/CD

Observability

Job description

Staff Software Engineer (Product + Platform Development)

Seattle, WA (Preferred) or McLean, VA or Remote (USA)

About Us

Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in rapidly scalable technology-led companies that are bringing revolutionary advancements to market in three distinct practice areas: healthcare, cyber, and national security. United by a shared sense of duty and deep belief in the power of innovation, Red Cell is developing powerful tools and solutions to address our Nation’s most pressing problems.

About Trase

Co-founded in 2023 byJoe Laws andGrant Verstandig , Trase Systems is AI, Uncomplicated. Trase empowers enterprise leaders to harness the full potential of AI without the associated complexity and risks. We are an end-to-end solution for deploying, managing, and optimizing AI in the enterprise. Our platform specializes in bridging the “last mile” of AI adoption, unlocking AI\'s full potential while driving efficiency and significant cost savings. Trase is at the forefront of AI Agent innovation, topping the Hugging Face GAIA Leaderboard for Generalized AI Assistants, ahead of industry giants such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI. We are leveraging our cutting-edge technologies to develop mission-critical agentic applications in complex industries such as Healthcare, Oil & Gas, and National Security.

About the Role

We are hiring a Staff Software Engineer who will split their time between building our core product and delivering it directly to customers. This role sits at the intersection of software engineering, product development, customer delivery, and operational execution.

You will embed with customer teams to understand their workflows and highest-value use cases, then build production-ready systems that solve real problems. Just as importantly, you will feed what you learn in the field back into the core product, shaping platform capabilities, reusable patterns, and roadmap so that each deployment makes the next one faster. You will move quickly from discovery to prototype to deployment while maintaining the engineering discipline required for secure and regulated environments.

This is a hands-on, senior engineering role. As a Staff engineer, you will set technical direction, make key architecture decisions, and raise the bar for how we build, while still writing code, debugging systems, and working through messy customer environments yourself. You should be comfortable translating vague requirements into concrete technical plans and communicating clearly with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

What You’ll Do

• 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.

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.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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.

If you want to be on the cutting edge of technology, building AI solutions for the future, and are up for a challenge, let’s talk!

Salary Range: $180,000-240,000. This represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience, skills, and other factors.

Some travel to customers may be required.

Trase-Specific Benefits:

For full-time roles only

• Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement withstrong performanceas 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 .

For full-time roles

• Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement withstrong performanceas 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 .

We’re an Equal Opportunity Employer: You’ll receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or on the basis of disability.

Voluntary Self-Identification

We are a federal contractor or subcontractor. The law requires us to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We have a goal of having at least 7% of our workers as people with disabilities. The law says we must measure our progress towards this goal. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had one. People can become disabled, so we need to ask this question at least every five years.

Completing this form is voluntary, and we hope that you will choose to do so. Your answer is confidential. No one who makes hiring decisions will see it. Your decision to complete the form and your answer will not harm you in any way. If you want to learn more about the law or this form, visit the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp .

How do you know if you have a disability?

A disability is a condition that substantially limits one or more of your “major life activities.” If you have or have ever had such a condition, you are a person with a disability. Disabilities include, but are not limited to:

• Alcohol or other substance use disorder (not currently using drugs illegally)
• Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV/AIDS
• Blind or low vision
• Cancer (past or present)
• Cardiovascular or heart disease
• Celiac disease
• Cerebral palsy
• Deaf or serious difficulty hearing
• Diabetes
• Disfigurement, for example, disfigurement caused by burns, wounds, accidents, or congenital disorders
• Epilepsy or other seizure disorder
• Gastrointestinal disorders, for example, Crohn\'s Disease, irritable bowel syndrome
• Intellectual or developmental disability
• Mental health conditions, for example, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD
• Missing limbs or partially missing limbs
• Mobility impairment, benefiting from the use of a wheelchair, scooter, walker, leg brace(s) and/or other supports
• Nervous system condition, for example, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS)
• Neurodivergence, for example, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia, other learning disabilities
• Partial or complete paralysis (any cause)
• Pulmonary or respiratory conditions, for example, tuberculosis, asthma, emphysema
• Short stature (dwarfism)
• Traumatic brain injury

Disability Status Select...

PUBLIC BURDEN STATEMENT: According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 no persons are required to respond to a collection of information unless such collection displays a valid OMB control number. This survey should take about 5 minutes to complete.