---
title: 'Software Engineer, Applied AI at Sobek AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-applied-ai-sobek-ai-seattle-ggchs3957qqk'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Software Engineer, Applied AI at Sobek AI

- **Company:** Sobek AI
- **Location:** Seattle, WA
- **Compensation:** $170k–$230k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-06-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sobek-ai/d6f3b090-2a13-4853-8950-e29bb8f2e7d0

## Job description

## ABOUT US AND THE ROLE

At Sobek AI, we’re building secure AI infrastructure for agentic workflows in life-sciences innovation networks and intergovernmental emergency response. Backed by $15M+ in funding, we work with global, high impact partners on distributed workflows where reliability, security, and trust matter from day one. Our systems are deployed in mission critical customer environments across 5 countries.

We’re hiring a software engineer to help build the production systems behind Sobek’s core offerings. The work sits where AI powered workflows meet backend services, enterprise data, observability, and product surfaces.

This is a foundational role on the engineering team. We’re looking for someone who has shipped real software used by customers and has hands on experience deep systems. You should be able to reason about model behavior, data access, evaluation, and production reliability as engineering problems.

## WHAT YOU’LL DO

## BUILD PRODUCTION AI WORKFLOWS

- Build AI powered workflows over enterprise and government data, with clear rules for what a model can see, what tools it can call, and when a human needs to review or approve an action.
- Design context and grounding systems that give models the right information at the right time without violating permissions or performance constraints.
- Work across backend services, APIs, async workers, data pipelines, internal tools, and product facing surfaces.

## BUILD PRODUCT AND PLATFORM INFRASTRUCTURE

- Design and ship services, data workflows, permissioning, and orchestration components that multiple Sobek products rely on.
- Build systems that operate over sensitive data with clear access boundaries, auditability, and predictable performance.
- Turn prototypes and customer specific workflows into reusable product infrastructure rather than one off logic.

## ENGINEER RELIABLE LLM SYSTEMS

- Build evals and feedback loops for model behavior and workflow outcomes.
- Own tracing and runtime visibility across models, context, tool calls, generated outputs.
- Debug failures from evidence: context, traces, tool responses, user review, production logs.

## LEAD THROUGH OWNERSHIP AND ENGINEERING QUALITY

- Take ownership of important product and platform surfaces without needing heavy direction.
- Write clean, maintainable code and create clear abstractions.
- Use tools like Claude Code, Codex, and similar systems to move faster, while applying the same standards to generated code as hand written code.
- Treat LLMs not as black boxes to call, but as architectural components with failure modes and costs to manage.

## ABOUT YOU

You have a track record of shipping production software used by real customers, and you have hands on experience building AI or LLM-powered systems.

You have strong software fundamentals and are fluent in Python and/or TypeScript. Our current stack spans React/TypeScript, Python services, gRPC, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Snowflake, and Docker; exact stack match is less important than range and judgment.

You are comfortable with ambiguity and accompanying ownership.

Especially strong candidates may have:

- shipped production LLM or agentic workflows at an AI native startup, scaled AI product company, or applied AI team;
- built evals or feedback loops that caught real regressions;
- debugged production failures in agent workflows, especially around grounding, tool use, or model/runtime boundaries;
- built systems that operate over enterprise data with defined security boundaries;
- worked in domains where wrong answers have serious consequences, such as scientific, medical, legal, financial, or public sector workflows;
- owned meaningful product or platform surface area earlier than their title would suggest.

## DETAILS

- Compensation: $170 K – $230 K
- Location: Hybrid (Seattle, WA)
- Visa: We do not sponsor visas for this role at this time
- Benefits: Company-paid health coverage (including dependents)
- Equity: Meaningful ownership for early engineers, with flexibility to extend for exceptional scope and impact.

## About Sobek AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Sobek AI builds the infrastructure for agentic workflows that cross organizational, IP, and national boundaries, enabling controlled collaboration in life sciences R&D, global health, and emergency response.
- **Entity Type**: Private (grant-funded; $10M+ in grants and funding)
- **Headquarters**: Seattle, Washington, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Luis Salazar, Ph.D. (Co-Founder, Co-CEO & CTO), Adarsh Mital (Co-Founder & CCO), David Grey (Co-Founder, Co-CEO & COO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Software Development – infrastructure for agentic workflows, with a focus on life sciences, global health, and government emergency response.
- **Target customers**: Research institutes, governments, pharmaceutical companies, and international health agencies (B2B / Enterprise / Government).
- **Mission**: To create a control layer that lets agents reach the data, know-how, tools, and resources of partner organizations while honoring each party’s sovereignty, sensitivities, and usage limits – making high-consequence cross-boundary collaboration fast and trustworthy.

## Products & Services
- **Sobek Platform (Control Layer for Agentic Workflows)**: A policy-aware orchestration layer that compiles partnering intent into enforceable endpoints and configurations. It works with existing infrastructure (agent frameworks, compute-to-data enclaves, document repositories) and adds governance, audit trails, and continuity for multi-party workflows.
- **Life Science R&D Programs**: Helps R&D teams capture expert know-how as guided workflows and share them across organizations without losing control of sensitive information. Supports secure knowledge repositories, SOP distribution, and open integration with existing tools and models.
- **GHEC AI (Global Health Emergency Coordination)**: A platform for large, multi-stakeholder government health programs and emergency-response operations. Includes a centralized directory and document repository, rapid generation of emergency response rosters, and scenario modeling for outbreak simulation and operational readiness.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total grants and funding – $10M+ to date, including a $5M multi-year grant from the Gates Foundation (renewed) and a $3M grant for a Global Health Emergency Response Platform.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Gates Foundation, PATH, Institut Pasteur de Dakar.
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 300% YoY (8 employees as of early 2026); deployed in 5 countries; executing multi-million dollar contracts in mRNA/RNA vaccine R&D and international public health coordination.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Cross-boundary governance**: Built from the ground up to handle IP protection, sovereignty, and reciprocal obligations – a critical differentiator for life sciences and government partnerships.
- **Works with existing infrastructure**: Sits above and alongside mainstream agent frameworks and collaboration tools, adding a thin control layer rather than replacing systems.
- **High-stakes focus**: Specializes in environments where “mostly working” isn’t acceptable (vaccine development, emergency response), which drives rigorous engineering standards.
- **Trustworthy AI approach**: Emphasis on forensic-grade traceability, multi-tenant isolation, and policy-aware orchestration.

## Strategic Focus
- Continue expanding in life sciences R&D (mRNA/RNA vaccines) and global health emergency coordination.
- Deepen partnerships with research institutes, governments, and pharma companies.
- Scale the platform to handle more complex multi-party workflows and new verticals where sensitive assets and cross-boundary obligations are the norm.

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-driven work**: Directly contribute to vaccine development, emergency response coordination, and other projects with real human impact – not ad optimization or content moderation.
- **Engineering culture**: Emphasis on first-principles thinking, operational rigor, and end-to-end ownership. The team builds production systems that require reliability, multi-tenant isolation, and forensic traceability.
- **Small, high-growth team**: 8 employees with 300% YoY growth – early employees will have outsized impact and ownership.
- **Work environment**: Headquarters in Seattle with presence in India. Remote/hybrid policy not explicitly stated, but the team appears distributed (US and India). The careers page emphasizes “own problems end-to-end” and a low tolerance for compromises that shift risk onto users.
- **Notable perks**: Not detailed, but the company is grant-funded and focused on impact; likely offers the chance to work on cutting-edge AI infrastructure with top partners like the Gates Foundation.

## Sources
1. [sobek.ai](https://sobek.ai/company-info/) – Company Info (team, traction, funding)
2. [sobek.ai](https://sobek.ai/) – Homepage (product description, use cases)
3. [sobek.ai](https://sobek.ai/careers/) – Careers page (culture, engineering focus)
4. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/sobek-ai) – LinkedIn profile (headcount, growth, headquarters, updates)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sobek-ai) – Jobs page (open roles)

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