Backend Software Engineer

Department: Valthos

Location: San Francisco, New York City

Employment Type: FullTime

Backend Software Engineer

Our client is seeking a Backend Software Engineer to join as a foundational software hire. This is an opportunity for an experienced platform engineer (ideally 3+ years post-graduation) who has already built and shipped production-grade infrastructure, and is excited to work at the intersection of software systems and applied biological intelligence.

Our client is an applied biological intelligence company focused on building and deploying software and AI-driven biological systems designed to address real-world challenges across both federal and commercial environments.

Advancements in AI architectures — from autonomous vehicles to precision aerospace systems and expert-level reasoning models — are now being applied to biological design. This role will contribute to the development of scalable software platforms that enable real-time insight into evolving biological and mutational landscapes.

You will work closely with AI Engineers and Computational Biologists to design and implement platforms that bring cutting-edge computational biology methods into practical use for scientific and technical end-users. Day-to-day responsibilities may include building distributed systems, managing containerized infrastructure, developing APIs, integrating open-source tooling, and adapting platform capabilities to meet user needs.

The Role

• Partner with AI Engineers and Computational Biologists to design and build high-scale APIs for data- and GPU-intensive workloads

• Prototype and develop interactive workflow interfaces for life sciences users

• Create and iterate on data visualization tools to support model interpretation and decision-making

• Collaborate with users to develop SDKs for technical stakeholders

• Develop and maintain secure cloud environments for sensitive data and results

• Build distributed systems capable of efficiently processing large-scale datasets across CPU and GPU infrastructure

• Maintain backend infrastructure supporting scalable storage and compute

• Design and build storage and search systems to support growing scale and latency requirements

• Develop internal systems that improve developer productivity, including development environments and automated deployment pipelines

Qualifications (Required)

• Experience implementing or working with distributed systems and associated technologies (e.g. Kubernetes, Docker)

• Working knowledge across the full application stack (API design, web frameworks, data modelling, relational databases, etc.)

• Comfortable operating in fast-paced, autonomous environments

Qualifications (Preferred)

• Experience working with AWS or other IaaS providers

• Experience working with large-scale data technologies (e.g. Parquet, Pandas)

• Experience building data pipelines and asynchronous processing systems

• Familiarity with biological datasets (e.g. sequence data) or bioinformatics tooling

• Contributions to open-source projects