Founding Engineer

Valius overview

At Valius, we believe that the future of cancer care will be defined by “maximalist” diagnostics: deep, comprehensive assessments of DNA, RNA, and protein designed to give patients and their care teams the best possible understanding of how their tumor works and what its vulnerabilities are.

We’re building the diagnostics and bioinformatics company to power this future, starting by applying this approach to patients with challenging cancers. In our first year, we worked with over 75 of these patients and, in many cases, identified plausible therapeutic targets which had not been discovered previously. This coming year, we’re on track to scale our patient volume significantly, all while bringing new diagnostic modalities (e.g., single-cell transcriptomics) and analytical approaches into clinical care for the very first time.

We’ve just raised a $13.5M seed round, led by 8VC and Basis Set Ventures, and are looking for people passionate about changing cancer care to join our growing team.

Founding engineer role

We’re hiring a Founding Engineer to build the technical foundation of Valius. You’ll work directly with the founders and our science team to define and build the infrastructure and products that bring our molecular insights to life. The role spans the full stack. On the front end, you’ll build AI-powered interfaces that help patients, care teams, and Valius scientists explore complex molecular data. On the back end, you’ll own the architecture and tooling that power our internal and external applications, and you’ll partner with our computational biologists to build and manage the data pipelines that process patient molecular data.

As one of our first engineers, you’ll make foundational decisions about how we build, from system design to engineering practices. As we grow, you’ll have an opportunity to step into leadership or supervising roles.

This role will be expected to work out of our beautiful San Francisco office four days a week.

What you'll do

Shape technical direction and roadmap: Partner with the founding team and science team to set the technical vision and roadmap for our internal and external applications.

Own architecture, infrastructure, and pipelines: Make key decisions on system design, cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, and our security and compliance posture, then implement them end to end. This includes building and maintaining the systems that reliably ingest, process, and manage patient molecular data.

Build intuitive front-end applications: Design and develop AI-powered interfaces that make complex molecular data accessible and actionable for patients, clinicians, and scientists.

Partner with computational biologists: Work closely with our science team to build tools that speed up their work.

Uphold engineering rigor: Write clean, well-tested code and set a high standard for reliability and maintainability across the codebase.

Contribute across the company: Pitch in on cross-functional initiatives and bring an engineering perspective to company-level decisions.

What you’ll bring

5+ years of professional software engineering experience

Strong full-stack foundation, with particular depth in back-end systems, data infrastructure, and cloud architecture (Python, FastAPI, AWS/GCP, data pipelines), plus front-end experience (React, TypeScript, Tailwind)

Experience making architectural decisions

Track record of taking ownership and shipping features end to end

Strong product instincts and the ability to work with non-engineering stakeholders to shape roadmaps

Strong communication skills

Excitement about working in a fast-moving, early-stage environment where the scope of the role will evolve

Experience in or exposure to life sciences, genomics, bioinformatics, or a related field

Commitment to our patient-focused mission

Other nice to haves

Experience as an early engineer or founding engineer at a startup

Experience mentoring engineers or acting as a tech lead

Background in data engineering or working with large datasets

Experience integrating AI features in production applications

Interest in growing into an engineering leadership role as the company scales

What we’ll bring

Competitive salary and meaningful founding-level equity

Generous refresh grants

Comprehensive benefits (health, dental, vision, 401(k))

Real investment in your professional development

Fun, mission-driven team culture