Principal Software Engineer, Neuroscience Platforms

Astera; Emeryville (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Open Science Policy

Equal opportunity employer

Job summary

Astera Neuro seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead the computational infrastructure for large-scale neuroscience research. You will work with scientists and hardware engineers across instrument control, data acquisition, and analysis, delivering reliable software for open-ended experiments.

As a principal engineer, you will define the technical roadmap, mentor others, and shape how neuroscience and engineering collaborate.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree with 12+ years in computer science, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, neuroscience, physics, or related field.
• Proven production-grade software engineering fundamentals with clean, well-documented code.
• Ability to scope open-ended goals into working systems without waiting for a complete spec.
• Deep intuition for latency, hardware limits, and data bottlenecks in real-time or performance-critical systems.
• Proficiency in at least two of Python, C++, C#, Rust.

Responsibilities

• Build stimulus presentation and acquisition systems with millisecond precision.
• Develop high-throughput pipelines for multi-modal neural datasets with versioned data formats and QC.
• Create dashboards, user interfaces, and experiment-design tools for scientists.
• Build cloud-based storage, processing, and sharing infrastructure for distributed teams.

Skills

Python

C++

C#

Rust

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Unity

Unreal Engine

CUDA

Job description

Company Overview

Astera Neuro, part of the Astera Institute, is building the tools to decipher and ultimately write the neural codes behind perception, thought, behavior, and internal state. Since these tools don't yet exist, we're assembling a founding team of neuroscientists, computational scientists, and engineers to build them (hardware, software, and methods) and use them to study neural activity at unprecedented scale, with direct relevance to neurological and psychiatric disease. We do high-risk, high-reward science in a well-resourced, collaborative environment with competitive pay, and share our work openly under Astera's Open Science Policy.

Position Summary

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will lead the computational infrastructure that the next generation of large-scale neuroscience research will depend on. Working closely with scientists and hardware engineers, you will span the full stack of our research systems, including instrument control, data acquisition, and analysis, translating open-ended experimental goals into reliable software. The problems are latency-sensitive, multi-modal, and deeply interdisciplinary. You do not need a background in neuroscience to apply; we are looking for an exceptional, pragmatic engineer who enjoys solving hard, interesting problems and picks up the science as they go. As a principal engineer, you will define the technical roadmap across systems, mentor other engineers, and shape how neuroscience and engineering work together at Astera.

What You Will Build

• Build stimulus presentation and acquisition systems, including VR environments in Unity, Unreal, or comparable frameworks, that synchronize peripheral streams (eye tracking, displays, haptics) with high-throughput neural recording hardware to millisecond precision.

• Build high-throughput pipelines to ingest, process, and store massive, multi-modal neural datasets (electrophysiology, calcium imaging, behavior), with versioned data formats, automated QC, and clear metadata standards.

• Build dashboards, user interfaces, and experiment-design tools that let scientists interact with complex data and run experiments seamlessly.

• Build cloud-based storage, processing, and sharing infrastructure that supports distributed teams and large-scale datasets.

Who You Are

Required:

• Bachelor's degree (or equivalent experience) with 12+ years of experience in computer science, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, neuroscience, physics, or a related field; graduate work or research experience in neuroscience or a related discipline is a plus but not required.

• Exceptional software engineering fundamentals, proven in production: you write clean, testable, well-documented code and approach system design thoughtfully.

• The range and independence to take a rough idea or open-ended goal, scope a path to a working system, and move forward without waiting for a complete spec.

• A deep intuition for latency, hardware limits, and data bottlenecks, earned building real-time or performance-critical systems in production (game engines, robotics, embedded systems, audio/video pipelines, or similar).

• Proficiency in at least two of: Python, C++, C#, Rust.

• Intellectual curiosity, collaborative instincts, and eagerness to learn the science around you.

• A track record of owning complex systems end-to-end, from architecture and implementation through operational reliability, and of making and defending technical tradeoffs across performance, maintainability, and team velocity.

• Comfort working across the full stack, from low-level hardware interfaces to cloud infrastructure, with the ability to build and iterate on human-facing research systems with speed and taste.

• A history of mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives, with the judgment to set technical direction across teams.

Preferred/Nice to Have:

• Familiarity with brain-machine interfaces, neural data acquisition systems, neural data formats and analysis tools.

• Background in machine learning, particularly online/streaming inference or neural decoding.

• Experience designing data pipelines at scale (Airflow, Prefect, or similar orchestration tools).

• Experience with GPU-accelerated computing (CUDA, Vulkan compute shaders).

• Familiarity with laboratory hardware integration (DAQ systems, TTL synchronization, serial/SPI protocols).

• Contributions to open-source neuroscience or scientific computing projects.

Why Join Us

Join a founding-caliber engineering team building the computational backbone for large-scale neuroscience research. You'll define technical direction across systems, work shoulder-to-shoulder with the scientists and hardware engineers who depend on what you build, and shape how software and science come together at Astera as the team grows.

Astera Neuro provides a comprehensive benefits package and total compensation that is competitive and commensurate with the level of experience and qualifications.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity and inclusion!