About Us

Co-founded in 2023 by Joe Laws and Grant 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

As Principal Software Engineer, you’ll own the core execution model and platform architecture of Trase OS - the shared platform (“agentic operating system”) that powers all Trase deployments in regulated environments. You’ll define the abstractions and APIs that connect workflows, agents, tools, and product surfaces, and ensure the correctness, scalability, and extensibility of the system.

This is a company-critical role: you are responsible for how the system behaves under real-world conditions, including failure, scale, and security constraints. Your work sets the technical direction for the platform and acts as a force multiplier across all engineering teams.

Clean abstractions and correctness-under-failure are critical because we operate long-lived agents in healthcare/defense environments where auditability and reliability are non-negotiable.

Why This Role Is Needed

Trase OS is an orchestration-heavy system coordinating long-lived workflows, agents, and tools across multiple services and environments.

As the platform evolves, the primary risks shift from implementation to system design quality:

Poor abstractions create tight coupling across services
Workflow execution becomes difficult to reason about under failure
Platform capabilities fragment instead of becoming reusable primitives
Scaling introduces complexity instead of leverage

This role exists to:

Define clean, durable abstractions for the platform execution model
Ensure correctness and determinism in workflow execution
Translate evolving product requirements into coherent platform architecture
Enable teams to build on Trase OS without introducing systemic complexity

What Makes This Role Hard

You are designing systems where failure is the norm, not the exception, and correctness must be preserved across retries, restarts, and partial execution
You must balance clean abstractions with real-world constraints (performance, security, multi-tenant environments)
Decisions made here become foundational primitives used across all products and teams
The system must remain understandable and auditable, even as complexity and scale increase

Responsibilities

Architect & lead the core execution model (state machine, lifecycle, resource model, failure semantics)
Design platform APIs/SDKs connecting workflows, agents, tools, and product surfaces; drive versioning & compatibility
Guarantee correctness via idempotency, deterministic replays, compensating actions, and data integrity
Engineer reliability at scale: concurrency controls, rate limits, backpressure, sharding/partitioning, and workload isolation
Build security & governance into the core: RBAC/ABAC, policy enforcement, fine-grained audit & lineage
Deliver observability: distributed tracing, structured logs, metrics, and evaluation hooks; build an “explainable trail” of agent actions
Own quality: design reviews, test strategy (unit, property, chaos), performance baselines, SLOs, incident response, and postmortems
Mentor & unblock senior engineers; partner with Product, Security, and Customer teams to translate requirements into durable primitives
Make pragmatic choices on storage, queueing, and compute; create paved roads that accelerate all other teams
Define system boundaries and reduce cross-service coupling through clear architectural patterns
Drive platform-wide standards for correctness, reliability, and API design across teams
Balance short-term delivery with long-term architectural integrity, ensuring the platform evolves without accumulating systemic risk

Principal-level Technical Leadership

Define and drive the long-term technical architecture of Trase OS across teams and domains
Influence company-wide technical direction for platform and product systems
Lead cross-team initiatives that shape how workflows, agents, and platform primitives are built and evolve
Partner with leadership to align technical architecture with product and business strategy
Mentor senior and staff engineers and raise the bar for system design and architectural thinking

Requirements

12-15+ years of experience building distributed/platform systems, including significant experience defining architecture across teams or domains
10+ years owning mission-critical runtimes or workflow/orchestration systems
Deep expertise with durable execution (e.g., state machines, event sourcing, saga/compensation, idempotency, exactly/at-least-once semantics)
Proven track record with security & governance in production systems (auth, RBAC, audit, policy)
Hands-on with observability (Grafana or equivalent), including trace correlation across async boundaries
Strong systems design across storage, queues, schedulers, and evented architectures; performance tuning under load
Excellence in a modern language (e.g., Go, Rust, Java, or TypeScript) and cloud-native stacks (containers, CI/CD, IaC)
Comfortable operating in regulated or high-assurance environments; bias toward correctness, clarity, and documentation
Proven ability to influence technical direction across an organization and drive adoption of architectural standards
Ability to incorporate advance LLM capabilities into system design and platform architecture decisions where appropriate

Nice to Have

Prior work on workflow engines (Temporal/Cadence/AWS Step Functions, Argo, Airflow) or serverless runtimes
Experience with policy engines (OPA), secrets/KMS, or data-handling controls (PII/PHI)
ML/LLM evaluation frameworks, tool/plugin architectures, or embedding model governance into execution
Government or healthcare experience (HIPAA, audit readiness) and multi-tenant isolation

Salary Range: $240,000-290,000. This represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience, skills, and other factors.

#LI-RCP

Our Trase Benefits:

For full-time roles only

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.

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.

Applicant Data Disclosure

By submitting an application, you acknowledge that Red Cell Partners, LLC ("Red Cell") uses third-party service providers to facilitate its recruitment and hiring processes. These providers include applicant tracking systems, candidate verification platforms, and fraud detection tools (collectively, "Hiring Platforms"). Your application materials, including your résumé, cover letter, work samples, responses to application questions, and any other information you submit, may be transmitted to and processed by these Hiring Platforms for the following purposes:

Managing and administering your application throughout the hiring process;

Verifying the accuracy and authenticity of application materials, including by cross-referencing information you provide against publicly available sources and proprietary databases;
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Applications that are flagged through this process as containing indicators of fraud or material misrepresentation may be declined from further consideration. If you have questions about the status of your application or the evaluation process, please contact talent@redcellpartners.com.

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Principal Software Engineer (Platform Architecture & Execution Model)

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