Staff Software Engineer - Forward Deployed

About the role

Red Cell Partners, an incubation firm investing in technology companies in healthcare, cyber and national security, is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for its AI platform Trase. The role splits time between building the core product and delivering it directly to customers, embedding with customer teams to understand their workflows and use cases before building production-ready systems. It is a hands-on, senior engineering position that sets technical direction and makes key architecture decisions while still writing code and debugging in customer environments.

Key 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, building reusable capabilities and adapting them for each customer.
• Build and deploy AI-enabled applications, agents and workflow automation using AI/ML and LLM techniques such as RAG, guardrails and evals.
• 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 and auditable.
• Debug issues in deployed environments and drive fast resolution across application, infrastructure, data and integration layers.

Required profile

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with production-quality systems.
• Ability to apply AI and ML techniques, including LLM-based approaches like RAG, guardrails and evals.
• Experience designing scalable systems and with backend engineering, distributed systems, APIs, data pipelines, cloud infrastructure or applied AI/ML systems.
• Comfort working across the full stack and in ambiguous customer environments.
• Strong technical communication and debugging skills, and high ownership.

Preferred qualifications

• Prior experience as a full-stack or backend engineer, forward deployed engineer, solutions engineer, product engineer, platform engineer or startup engineer.
• Experience with AI agents, LLM applications, workflow orchestration, evals, guardrails, retrieval systems or model deployment.
• Cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, CI/CD, observability and secure deployment practices.
• Identity and access management, audit logging, data governance and experience in compliant or regulated environments.

What we offer

• Salary range of $180,000-$240,000.
• Career track with potential for rapid advancement.
• Comprehensive employer-paid health care, dental and vision, plus paid maternity and paternity leave.
• Unlimited PTO, professional development opportunities and optional 401K, FSA and equity incentives.
• Mental health benefits through Tara Mind.