# Flaviu Vadan > Senior Software Engineer @ XairaTx | AI/ML for Protein Design Location: Seattle, Washington, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/flaviuvadan Staff Engineer | AI/ML for Drug Discovery | Protein Design Impact-driven engineer focused on user and scientific outcomes. I build ML infrastructure and products for computational biology. Background in bioinformatics with experience spanning spanning research, engineering, and deployment. I created Hera, an open-source workflow orchestration tool (800+ GitHub stars), now used by several large organizations for model training and inference. Open to: startup advising, consulting, technical advisory roles in biotech/life sciences. ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Xaira Therapeutics Jan 2024 – Present | Seattle, Washington, United States Xaira Therapeutics (https://xaira.com) is pioneering the discovery and development of life-changing medicines through the transformative power of artificial intelligence. At Xaira, I am leading the development of a best-in-class therapeutics design engine that generates the medicines of tomorrow together with some of the brightest minds in the industry! The design engine integrates a variety of models for end to end protein design, schedules inference on an elastic compute base layer, and integrates with lab data sources. In addition to my work on the design engine I collaborated with Xaira's CSO on a data integration initiative to unify all of Xaira's disparate data sources under a single unified FAIR data access layer to facilitate end to end data tracking for therapeutic development and future regulatory submissions. ### Startup Advisor @ Stealth Jan 2022 – Present I collaborate with founders on organization direction, enterprise sales, internal product development, expansion into new verticals, and customer support (from internal product development to Kubernetes-based platform optimization). Examples: - brought in enterprise contracts that contributed $200k+ to ARR on the path to $1M+ while focusing on facilitating the creation and maintenance of customer relationships - created drug design platforms that facilitate large scale processing of lab instrument and high throughput assay data ### Open Source Engineer @ Hera Jan 2021 – Jan 2024 I designed, developed, and maintained Hera (https://github.com/argoproj-labs/hera), an open source Python SDK that makes access to Kubernetes and Argo Workflows easy. Hera was open sourced in collaboration with Intuit and has been featured at conferences such as KubeCon/CloudNativeCon for multiple years not only in maintainer presentations but also independently by other organizations. I had the opportunity to work with amazing collaborators, organizations, and open source developers with a clear dedication to making open source tools accessible to any organization and individual. In addition to design, development, and maintenance I managed the maintainers team for a few years while I was deeply involved with project management, governance, roadmap creation, user interviews, and propagation of feedback from high level discussions to low level technical details. Hera has been applied in fields such as: - biotechnology at Dyno Therapeutics, Absci, Exscientia, Reverie Labs, and Gingko Bioworks - banking at the Royal Bank of Canada, and US Bank - trading/asset analysis at Bloomberg - data asset management at Pipekit, and PayIt - large scale distributed model training at Infinite Lambda and Intuition Machines - platform development efforts at Nvidia Since its inception Hera has gained several additional astounding maintainers (Elliot Gunton from Pipekit, ex-Bloomberg, Sambhav Khotari from Bloomberg, and a few other maintainers from Bloomberg). I departed the project on great terms in November 2024 after 3 years of authorship, contributions, and maintenance. ### Staff Software Engineer @ Dyno Therapeutics Jan 2023 – Jan 2024 | Watertown, Massachusetts, United States Dyno Therapeutics (https://dynotx.com) uses machine-guided design and quantitative high-throughput in vivo experimentation to develop new ways to design gene vectors with a focus on cell-targeting capsid proteins from adeno-associated virus (AAV) - the most widely-used vector for gene therapies. I joined Dyno as a Software Engineer and I was incredibly fortunate to have done just about everything. I initially focused on compute, where I established the organization wide Kubernetes-based infrastructure that powers lab data processing, model training, ETLs, CICD, and internal services to this day. As my role evolved to Senior I started focusing on distributed model training on Kubernetes. Those efforts saved days of training and inference while maintaining model quality and performance. With the switch to Staff I started working on the machine guided design platform for engineering AAV gene therapy vectors; I focused on researching, conducting, and delivering AAV sequence experiments with specific tropism goals in accordance with external partnership agreements. In addition to my research role I focused on leading the design and delivery of data warehousing solutions for AAV sequence performance data, which is actively used for scientific decision making, sequence design, and product releases. Lastly, together with team managers, I was accountable for the engineering roadmap of the division while maintaining independent contributor status and focus on mentorship. After almost 4 years at Dyno the team has grown significantly and the infrastructure was in a great place to power the next phase of Dyno's growth. I left on great terms and I view my experience at Dyno fondly. I worked with astounding, world-class, scientists and engineers building revolutionary technology for the field of gene therapy and I cannot recommend Dyno enough! ### Senior Software Engineer @ Dyno Therapeutics Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States ### Software Engineer @ Dyno Therapeutics Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States ### Software Developer @ Vendasta Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Vendasta (https://vendasta.com) is a company that provides online ecommerce and marketing solutions for small and medium sized businesses. I started off at Vendasta as an intern and I returned to the company for several months after I graduated in 2020 (I was on leave for 8 months to finish my undergraduate degree). I worked as a software developer on a product called WebsitePro, which is a WordPress-hosting platform focused on ecommerce. At the time, the platform processed approximately 10 million requests per day and is hosted on the Google Cloud Platform. While on the team, I worked on developing infrastructure using Kubernetes, Redis, NGINX, and CloudSQL, mostly using Golang and Python, and developed some client-facing features using Angular/Typescript. I had the opportunity to design an build an automated daily clean-up system for CloudSQL records and Google Cloud Storage items that saved almost 100TB of storage costs. In addition, I also designed and implemented a critical component of the product infrastructure using Google Cloud Memorystore; the service I worked on processed requests with an average latency of 5 milliseconds. Lastly, I had the opportunity to interview, mentor, and onboard new developers. I have learned a great number of lessons at Vendasta! I had amazing support from leadership members and I left the company on good terms. I wrote several blogs for the company, which can be found on Medium: https://medium.com/vendasta ### Teaching Assistant @ University of Saskatchewan Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | Department of Computer Science I was a teaching assistant for the Introduction to Bioinformatics Applications (https://catalogue.usask.ca/BINF-210) course, and Introduction to Bioinformatics (https://catalogue.usask.ca/BINF-200), which gave me the opportunity to work closely with students as their tutorial leade. I also marked assignments and class examinations. In addition to Bioinformatics courses, I also marked assignments and examinations for the College of Engineering Calculus 1 and Calculus 2 courses (https://catalogue.usask.ca/MATH-123, https://catalogue.usask.ca/MATH-124). ### Research Assistant @ University of Saskatchewan Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Saskatoon, Saskatchewan I worked as a research assistant in the Bioinformatics lab of Dr. Anthony Kusalik, supported by a National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Undergraduate Student Research Assistantship (USRA) grant. During my assistantship, I contributed to the development of pipelines for incorporating newly proposed genomic structures (topologically-associated domains) into state-of-the-art motif discovery tools. My work mainly used Perl, Bash, and R packages for Bioinformatics. At the end of the assistantship, I presented the results at an NSERC poster symposium. In addition, after the assistantship term ended, I continued to pursue research in collaboration with members of other departments. The work I continued to pursue studied how the drug metformin impacted a transcription factor network in a specific cell line. The work was published in Nature Scientific Protocols: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-41839-1 ### Research Assistant @ University of Saskatchewan Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Saskatoon, Saskatchewan I worked as a research assistant in the Computer Science lab of Dr. Kevin Stanley and Dr. Nathaniel Osgood, supported by a National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Undergraduate Student Research Assistantship (USRA) grant. During my time in Dr. Stanley's and Dr. Osgood's laboratory, I designed and implemented a human movement analysis technique using a mathematical relationship (Minkowski-Bouligand) between the properties of high-dimensional objects - specifically, hypercubes. I have used interesting data structures, such as k-dimensional trees, in the implementation of the technique to estimate the complexity of human mobility datasets. I also had the opportunity to share the results of the work by drafting and writing the original version of the manuscript that is published in PLOS: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0218966 ### Student Peer Advisor @ University of Saskatchewan Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | Saskatoon, Saskatchewan After my first year of university, I had the chance to work as a student advisor for the College of Arts and Science. During my stay, I assisted students with academic, personal, and housing concerns. In addition, I worked with international students to address questions about the interpretation of University of Saskatchewan's policies and regulations for admissions. Lastly, I participated in the development of programs tailored to meet the needs of distinct student populations. ## Education ### Bachelor’s Degree in Bioinformatics University of Saskatchewan Jan 2014 – Jan 2020 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/flaviuvadan --- Source: https://flows.cv/flaviuvadan JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/flaviuvadan/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-23