Staff Developer Experience Engineer
$170k - $230k USD
About Us
Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in rapidly scalable technology-led companies that are bringing revolutionary advancements to market in three distinct practice areas: healthcare, cyber, and national security. United by a shared sense of duty and deep belief in the power of innovation, Red Cell is developing powerful tools and solutions to address our Nation’s most pressing problems.
About Trase
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
Location: Seattle, WA area
As a Staff Developer Experience Engineer (DevEx), you will own the systems, tooling, and workflows that enable engineers to build, test, and ship on Trase OS quickly and safely. As the first DevEx hire, you will build the base of the platform and team.
This is a core platform engineering role, not internal tooling support. You will design and operate the development environment, build systems, and integration infrastructure that allow teams to work effectively in a distributed, multi-service system with strict reliability and security constraints.
Your work directly determines engineering velocity, system safety, and the ability to scale the team without increasing risk.
Why this role is needed
Trase OS is a complex, evolving platform with long-lived workflows, multiple services, and deployments across environments with varying security requirements.
As system complexity grows, developer friction and release risk become the primary bottlenecks. Without strong DevEx ownership:
- Cross-service changes become slow and error-prone
- Integration issues surface late (or in production)
- Local development diverges from production reality
- Each team reinvents workflows instead of building on shared foundations
This role exists to:
- Create paved roads for development and testing
- Ensure engineers can make changes confidently across services and environments
- Turn platform complexity into repeatable, reliable developer workflows
What you'll do
You will work on:
- A shared platform powering all Trase deployments
- Multi-service systems with complex integration points
- Development and testing workflows that must reflect real production behavior
- Tooling that enables safe iteration in security- and compliance-sensitive environments
You will:
- Design and maintain local development environments that mirror production behavior as closely as possible
- Build and operate build systems, CI pipelines, and test orchestration for multi-service systems
- Own integration and end-to-end testing infrastructure, including:
- Test environments and fixtures
- Cross-service test coordination
- Flake detection and reduction
- Develop internal tooling (CLI, SDKs, scaffolding) that standardizes how engineers interact with the platform
- Create repeatable workflows for building, testing, and deploying changes across services
- Improve developer feedback loops (build times, test reliability, debugging workflows)
- Partner with DevOps/SRE to ensure development workflows align with production reliability and deployment systems
- Establish and maintain runbooks, templates, and onboarding systems that reduce ramp time and inconsistency
Staff-level technical leadership
- Define and drive the developer experience strategy across Trase OS
- Establish standards for:
- Build and test systems
- Local development environments
- Cross-service integration workflows
- Identify and eliminate systemic sources of developer friction
- Partner with platform and product engineers to ensure new systems are designed with operability and testability in mind
- Mentor engineers and raise the bar for engineering productivity and development ergonomics
Qualifications
Required
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with significant focus on developer tooling, build systems, or platform engineering
- Experience working in multi-service or distributed systems environments
- Strong experience with:
- CI/CD systems and build tooling
- Test infrastructure (integration / E2E)
- Developer tooling (CLIs, SDKs, scaffolding)
- Strong software engineering fundamentals (ability to build and maintain internal platforms/tools)
- Proven ability to improve developer velocity and system reliability simultaneously
- Experience driving cross-team technical initiatives
- Experience integrating LLMs into developer tooling, build systems, or internal platforms to improve engineering productivity
Nice to have
- Experience designing local-first or production-like dev environments (e.g., containerized or ephemeral environments)
- Experience reducing test flakiness at scale
- Familiarity with observability tooling for debugging developer workflows
- Experience working in regulated or security-sensitive environments
- Experience working with and extending developer productivity and build tooling to improve engineering workflows (e.g., GitHub, Linear, Bazel, SonarQube, Tilt, Notion, Cursor)
Benefits
- 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 with educational reimbursements.
- Optional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives available.
- Mental health benefits through TARA Mind.
Some travel is required.
If you want to be on the cutting edge of technology, building AI solutions for the future, and are up for a challenge, let’s talk!
Salary Range: $170,000-230,000. This represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience, skills, and other factors.
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
Our Red Cell Partners Benefits:
For full-time roles
- 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.
- Cost effective GLP-1 solutions available through Crux.
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:
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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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