Principal Software Engineer (AI)

TL;DR

Principal Software Engineer (AI): Designing and owning the core execution model and platform architecture for Trase OS, an agentic operating system for enterprise AI deployments with an accent on durable execution, scalability, and correctness-under-failure. Focus on building clean abstractions for long-lived agent workflows and ensuring reliability in highly regulated environments.

Location: Must be based in the USA (Seattle, WA; McLean, VA; or Remote)

Salary: $240,000–$290,000

Company

An incubation firm building and investing in scalable technology-led companies within healthcare, cyber, and national security domains.

What you will do

• Architect the core execution model, including state machines, lifecycles, and failure semantics for Trase OS.
• Design platform APIs and SDKs that connect workflows, agents, and product surfaces while ensuring version compatibility.
• Guarantee system correctness through idempotency, deterministic replays, and compensating actions.
• Engineer reliability at scale by implementing concurrency controls, rate limits, and workload isolation.
• Build security and governance into the core using RBAC/ABAC and fine-grained audit lineages.
• Drive the long-term technical architecture of the platform and mentor senior and staff engineers.

Requirements

• 12-15+ years of experience building distributed or platform systems.
• 10+ years owning mission-critical runtimes or workflow/orchestration systems.
• Deep expertise with durable execution (state machines, event sourcing, saga patterns).
• Strong systems design skills across storage, queues, schedulers, and evented architectures.
• Proficiency in Go, Rust, Java, or TypeScript and cloud-native stacks.
• Ability to operate in regulated or high-assurance environments with a bias toward correctness.

Nice to have

• Experience with workflow engines like Temporal, Cadence, Argo, or Airflow.
• Knowledge of policy engines (OPA), secrets/KMS, or PII/PHI data-handling controls.
• Experience with ML/LLM evaluation frameworks and tool architectures.
• Prior experience in Government or Healthcare sectors (HIPAA compliance).

Culture & Benefits

• 100% employer-paid comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and families.
• 14 weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave at normal pay.
• Unlimited PTO with management approval.
• Optional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives.
• Mental health benefits via Tara Mind and GLP-1 solutions via Crux.