---
title: 'Member of Technical Staff - Design Engineer at Valthos'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-design-engineer-valthos-new-york-4c2p936s2xms'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Member of Technical Staff - Design Engineer at Valthos

- **Company:** Valthos
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-29
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/valthos/9b7ea5d6-7900-4013-bfe7-2c28d90fd6d2

## Job description

Design Engineer Valthos Inc. Valthos is an applied biological intelligence company. We build and deploy software and biological AI systems to safeguard humanity. The same AI architectures that enable self-driving cars, land rockets with precision, and deliver expert-level reasoning are beginning to be deployed in biological design. To stay ahead, we must advance our arsenal of tools to capture and design against real-time sensitivities in nature's evolving mutational landscape. We are a group of mission-driven software engineers from Palantir and applied biological ML engineers from MIT's Broad Institute and DeepMind making the latest advances in computational biology accessible in the real-world for federal and commercial use. Finding a biological signal is only half the job. The other half is helping someone understand it, decide whether to trust it, and know what to do next. Valthos users are trying to recognize biological threats, protect people, and make decisions before the picture is complete. The work is full of uncertainty, competing evidence, and unfamiliar technical detail. They need to move from raw data to an answer they can defend: what changed, why it matters, how strongly the evidence supports the conclusion, what remains uncertain, and what to do next. Design at Valthos makes that path clear without flattening the science or pretending the uncertainty is not there. A design engineer at Valthos helps define how the platform works and feels from the ground up. The work spans product design and frontend engineering and requires direct collaboration with computational biologists, engineers, business development, and users on workflows that are still rough or only partly understood. A project may begin with a sketch, move into a coded prototype, and end as production software tested against how people actually work. There is no handoff between design and engineering; the role owns the path from idea to working product. The person who thrives here has strong taste but is not precious about process. They are curious enough to learn a hard domain, technical enough to carry an idea into production, and thoughtful enough to simplify without hiding what matters. They notice when a chart is technically correct but misleading, when a workflow asks too much of the user, or when a polished screen still has not earned trust. They care about the details because, in this product, the details affect whether the answer is useful. This role carries genuine ownership over the product’s visual language, interaction patterns, and design foundations. It is an opportunity to build serious software for serious work—and make it genuinely good to use.

## The Role

- Own the design and frontend implementation of core product experiences, from early user flows and prototypes through production-ready interfaces
- Work directly with users, founders, engineers, and computational biologists to understand complex operational and scientific workflows and translate them into clear, usable software
- Design and build interfaces for data exploration, analytical workflows, alerts, review processes, and decision support, preserving the evidence and context users need to evaluate the result and determine what to do next
- Rapidly prototype new product concepts for user research, pilots, demos, and customer discovery, and refine them through feedback and observations
- Establish and evolve the visual language, interaction patterns, design system, and component foundations that keep the product coherent as it grows
- Bring strong product judgment to decisions across information architecture, data visualization, interaction design, and frontend architecture
- Improve the clarity, credibility, and usability of the product across onboarding, navigation, workflow execution, results interpretation, and review

## Qualifications (required)

- Demonstrated experience owning both the design and frontend implementation of production-quality web applications, from early exploration through shipped product
- Strong product and design judgment across interaction, information, and visual design, with the ability to create clear hierarchy, thoughtful flows, and polished interfaces for complex or information-dense software
- Demonstrated ability to translate technical, ambiguous, or unfamiliar workflows into understandable software without removing the detail users need to make good decisions
- Strong frontend engineering skills, especially with React, TypeScript, modern CSS, and component-based application architecture
- Fluency moving between sketches, Figma, coded prototypes, and production implementation, with good judgment about the right level of fidelity for the problem
- Systems thinking across design and engineering, with an emphasis on reusable interaction patterns, coherent product structure, maintainable components, and a consistent design language
- Demonstrated ability to learn quickly, work independently, make reasonable tradeoffs, and carry an unclear problem through to a shipped solution
- Strong communication skills, especially around design rationale, product tradeoffs, and implementation decisions
- Comfort working on sensitive biological and national-security problems with discretion and good judgment

## Qualifications (preferred)

- Experience designing analytical, scientific, developer, operational, or other data-rich software
- Experience building data visualizations, maps, timelines, graphs, or other visual representations beyond conventional dashboards
- Experience creating or evolving a design system and its corresponding component library
- Experience using AI-assisted design and development tools to accelerate exploration, prototyping, and implementation, with the judgment to evaluate, refine, and take responsibility for the result
- Experience working in an early-stage product environment with evolving requirements and close contact with users
- Background in or exposure to computational biology, bioinformatics, biodefense, or national security

If there is a fit, we will schedule behavioral and technical interviews. The final step is an onsite in our office, where you will work on a small project, discuss ideas, and work with the wider team.

## About Valthos

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Valthos builds frontier AI systems that identify biological threats and design medical countermeasures in real time, strengthening biodefense for government and life sciences stakeholders.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage – $30M raised)
- **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Kathleen McMahon (Co-Founder & CEO) and Tess van Stekelenburg (Co-Founder & President)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Biodefense, Artificial Intelligence, Biotechnology
- **Target customers**: Government agencies (biodefense, national security) and life sciences organizations (pharma, biotech, public health)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To build next-generation biodefense by developing AI systems that can rapidly characterize biological sequences and design adaptive medical countermeasures, ensuring threats are neutralized as fast as they emerge.

## Products & Services
- **Frontier AI Biodefense Platform**: A software infrastructure that harnesses computational methods to characterize biological sequences and compress the time to design medical countermeasures. The platform is designed for experts in government and life sciences to detect and mitigate biological threats with speed and precision. Type: AI/Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for defense and biosecurity.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (Private company)
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding – $30 million (Seed round, announced October 29, 2025)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: OpenAI Startup Fund, Lux Capital, Founders Fund. Additional support from investors including OpenAI, Lux Capital, Founders Fund, and more.
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Raised $30M seed financing from top-tier investors (OpenAI, Lux, Founders Fund) signaling strong institutional confidence.
  - Founding team drawn from Palantir, DeepMind, Broad Institute, and Arc Institute.
  - Actively hiring across 12+ open positions (Applied AI, Software Engineering, Computational Biology, Operations) as of mid-2025.
  - LinkedIn follower growth of +10.7% monthly, indicating increasing brand awareness.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Unique positioning at the intersection of AI and biodefense**: Addresses a critical, high-stakes niche that few startups target.
- **World-class founding team**: CEO Kathleen McMahon previously led Palantir’s Life Sciences division; President Tess van Stekelenburg is a partner at Lux Capital. Technical leads come from DeepMind, Broad Institute, and Arc Institute.
- **Backing from AI and defense leaders**: OpenAI, Lux Capital, and Founders Fund provide both capital and strategic credibility.
- **First-mover in adaptive countermeasure design**: The platform aims to update medical countermeasures in real time, solving the asymmetry problem where pathogens can be created faster than cures.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale software infrastructure** for government and commercial biodefense stakeholders.
- **Expand engineering and research teams** – currently hiring for applied AI, forward deployed engineers, computational biologists, and operations roles.
- **Deepen partnerships** with government agencies and life sciences organizations to deploy the platform against emerging biological threats.
- **Lay groundwork for adaptive, precision therapeutics** beyond immediate biodefense applications.

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-driven work**: Directly contribute to protecting humanity from biological threats – a high-impact, urgent problem.
- **Elite team environment**: Work alongside engineers and scientists from Palantir, DeepMind, Broad Institute, and Arc Institute.
- **Strong backing and resources**: $30M seed funding from top-tier investors provides runway and stability.
- **In-office culture**: Valthos operates from a physical office in New York, NY, with an in-office expectation (as per Built In profile).
- **Growth opportunities**: Early-stage company with 8–10 employees and 12+ open roles – new hires will shape the company’s technical and operational direction.
- **Notable perks**: Not explicitly listed, but typical early-stage startup benefits (equity, competitive comp) likely apply. Emphasis on engineering and biotech talent.

## Sources
1. [valthos.com](https://valthos.com/)
2. [valthos.com/blog/intro](https://valthos.com/blog/intro)
3. [LinkedIn – Valthos](https://www.linkedin.com/company/valthos)
4. [PRNewswire – Valthos Raises $30M](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/valthos-raises-30m-from-openai-lux-capital-founders-fund-to-build-next-generation-biodefense-302598583.html)
5. [Built In – Valthos Careers](https://builtin.com/company/valthos)

## Other roles at Valthos

- [Member of Technical Staff - Applied Computational Biologist](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-applied-computational-biologist-valthos-new-york-kkc2rcm5zz8b) — New York, NY
- [Operations - Generalist / Business Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/operations-generalist-business-operations-valthos-new-york-jst2nbp58bj3) — New York, NY
- [Operations - Growth Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/operations-growth-operations-valthos-new-york-phncnx45xzjs) — New York, NY
- [Member of Technical Staff - Forward Deployed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-forward-deployed-engineer-valthos-new-york-byw70s6r2cw7) — New York, NY
- [Member of Technical Staff - Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-software-engineer-valthos-new-york-zm8g3pacag4t) — New York, NY
- [Member of Technical Staff - Applied AI Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-applied-ai-engineer-valthos-new-york-x22v06zd45cs) — New York, NY
- [Member of Technical Staff - Computational Biologist](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-computational-biologist-valthos-new-york-ffq3qxx60872) — New York, NY