Member of Technical Staff - Forward Deployed Engineer

The Role

Own the end-to-end deployment of Valthos's platform in customer environments, from scoping requirements through go-live and iteration
Embed with government and commercial users to deeply understand their missions, workflows, and pain points across biosurveillance, threat characterization, and countermeasure design
Build integrations, custom tooling, and configurations that connect Valthos capabilities to customer-specific data sources, infrastructure, and operational needs
Translate complex computational biology methods into production-quality, user-facing workflows, packaging research artifacts into tools that are reliable, usable, and maintainable
Play a key role in go-to-market and business development; work to shape and incept funding for biodefense, source opportunities and contracts, write and submit proposals, etc.
Serve as the technical face of Valthos in customer engagements, working with scientists, analysts, and senior government stakeholders
Close the feedback loop between the field and the product team, synthesizing customer needs into actionable engineering and product requirements that shape the roadmap
Rapidly prototype and ship custom solutions when standard product capabilities do not yet meet a mission need, working across the full stack

Qualifications (required)

• Strong software engineering background with demonstrated ability to build and ship production systems
• Expertise with Python, react, typescript, and other common languages and technologies
• Mastery of data structures, storage systems, cloud infrastructure, front-end frameworks, and other technical underpinnings of modern application stacks
• Deep understanding of how technical decisions impact the user of what you are building and how to balance tradeoffs between technical complexity and speed of iteration
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate effectively in teams of technical and non-technical individuals, and comfortable working in a rapidly changing environment with dynamic objectives and iteration with users
• Demonstrated ability to continuously learn, work independently, and make decisions with minimal supervision
• Willingness and interest to travel approximately 25%+ of the time to customer sites, including government facilities

Qualifications (preferred)

• Experience in defense tech, national security, or government contracting environments
• Background in or exposure to computational biology, bioinformatics, or life sciences
• Experience deploying ML/AI systems into operational or production environments
• Prior work in forward deployed, field engineering, solutions engineering, or technical account management roles
• Familiarity with bioinformatics tools and workflows (sequence analysis, protein structure prediction, genomic data pipelines)