Staff Software Engineer | Core Platform

About Manifold Manifold is the AI platform for life sciences, accelerating life-changing medicines to patients. Our products speed up workflows in areas from target identification and clinical development to market access and precision medicine in the clinic, while maintaining the governance life sciences requires. Global companies and premier research institutions use Manifold to operate faster and more effectively. Backed by leading investors including Reach Capital, TQ Ventures, Calibrate Ventures, SilverArc Capital, and Industry Ventures, Manifold serves tens of thousands of users across hundreds of organizations globally. About the Role Manifold is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the Core Platform team: A small, senior group responsible for the foundational services that power Manifold's data, compute, and workflow capabilities. As a Staff Engineer on the Core team you’ll have an opportunity to work on compute infrastructure, workflow orchestration, data pipelines, platform APIs and MCP services. You will be supporting active enterprise users (and their AI agents) who are analyzing genomics and life sciences datasets at scale. This is a hands-on, individual contributor role. But we’re also looking for individuals who demonstrate a strong sense of ownership and are experienced enough to help shape our longer term product architecture. These core services play a critical role in Manifold's success, and help our customers bring life-changing medicines to patients faster. What You'll Do Help design, build and operate Manifold’s compute and workflow orchestration services. Develop extensible and durable solutions for AMI management, autoscaling, custom runtime environments, 3rd party tool support, etc. Work closely with SRE team to Improve reliability and observability of Manifold core services. Establish operational standards, alerting, and run-books that move the team from reactive firefighting to proactive ownership. Be a technical multiplier. Mentor engineers, drive technical decisions through clearly written artifacts, and bring a cross-cutting perspective that improves the team's collective output. Partner with Product, Forward Deployed Engineers, and account teams to translate bespoke enterprise requirements into durable platform capabilities. Fully understand customers’ most pressing problems and validate end-to-end solutions. Contribute to Manifold’s AI-native platform vision. Spot AI industry trends before they happen, and have informed opinions about how they potentially benefit life sciences research. What You'll Bring 8+ years of enterprise software experience, with a meaningful portion spent on backend, infrastructure-adjacent, or distributed systems work. You've owned complex, scalable, production systems and can share plenty of real-world stories. Mastery of Python and deep infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) experience. Experience managing compute environments on AWS (EC2, ECS, Batch,…