Research Engineer

Altara Technologies, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Altara Technologies, Inc. in San Francisco is seeking an AI Systems Engineer to build the scientific intelligence platform for various industries. You will translate AI research into production-ready systems, develop data analysis systems, and act as a technical leader guiding the organization's vision. Applicants should have experience in AI/ML engineering, data workflows, and a strong commitment to solving meaningful challenges. This role thrives in fast-paced environments and values hands-on problem ownership.

Qualifications

• Experience translating AI research into production-grade systems.
• Product-minded with a customer-first approach.
• Comfortable working in fast-paced, unstructured environments.

Responsibilities

• Translate cutting-edge AI research into production-grade systems.
• Build evaluations and benchmarks for performance measurement.
• Develop systems for data ingestion and insight extraction.
• Act as a technical leader defining engineering culture.

Skills

AI/ML engineering

Research and engineering experience

Architecting multi-agent workflows

Working with multimodal data

Building search and knowledge retrieval systems

Job description

We’re building the scientific intelligence platform for the physical world, to accelerate breakthroughs in semiconductors, batteries, advanced materials, aerospace, and beyond. These industries represent trillions in R&D spend, but are still trapped in outdated software. We’re changing that by building the intelligence layer to help scientists and engineers move faster and solve core R&D problems.

What you’ll do:

• Translate cutting-edge AI research into production‑grade systems.
• Build evals and benchmarks to rigorously measure model and agent performance across a wide variety of scientific tasks.
• Develop data ingestion and representation systems that can automatically extract structure and insight from multimodal, messy real‑world scientific data (e.g., R&D databases, spreadsheets, images, technical documents, etc).
• Build both LLM‑based agentic systems and implementations beyond LLMs.
• Act as a technical leader across the organization, helping to define Altara’s technical vision and engineering culture as we scale.

We would love to meet you if you:

• Care about solving meaningful scientific challenges and disrupting the industry.
• Have experience at the intersection of research and engineering: comfortable reading papers one hour and debugging data pipelines the next.
• Have applied AI/ML engineering and research experience, especially with architecting multi‑agent workflows, working with multimodal data, or building search and knowledge retrieval systems.
• Consider yourself product‑minded and customer‑first.
• Love to learn, bias toward action, and enjoy taking full ownership of problems end‑to‑end.
• Thrive in fast‑paced, unstructured environments with evolving requirements.
• Already use AI tools daily and think critically about how to push their limits.

Bonus points if you have:

• Shipped 0‑to‑1 products at a startup, applied AI lab, or other high‑growth environments before.
• Experience or deep curiosity in science.