Staff Software Engineer (Platform Architecture & Execution Model)

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 Staff 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

Develop 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

Requirements

10+ years of experience building distributed/platform systems, including significant experience defining architecture across teams or domains

Experience building 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 …