Senior Software Engineer, Auctions

Alt; United States; On-site; USD 132,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

PTO

Parental leave at full salary

Wellness stipend

Home office stipend

DoorDash Pass

Remote-first

401(k)

Alt Equity

Job summary

Alt is building the backend that powers real-time auctions for high-value collectibles, delivering low-latency bid resolution and a responsive UI for market-leading speed. You will own both the concurrency engine and the user-facing surfaces that show live bids as they land.

In this role you’ll advance AI-driven liquidity features, scalable listing systems, and personalized discovery to connect buyers with one-of-a-kind items while mentoring the team on code quality and performance.

Responsibilities

• The auction engine. Build and scale the high-concurrency bidding and listing systems that power nine-figure annual GMV.
• AI-powered liquidity. Develop features that give consignors and sellers instant valuations and upfront liquidity.
• Personalized discovery. Use data and ML to match collectibles to buyers.
• Power-seller tooling. Design and launch tools that high-frequency sellers need.
• The whole experience. Backend bid resolution through the UI you own.

Job description

Alt is unlocking the value of alternative assets, starting with the $5 B trading-card market. We let collectors buy, sell, vault, and finance their cards in one place and we are backed by leaders at Stripe, Coinbase, Seven Seven Six, and pro athletes like Tom Brady and Giannis Antetokounmpo. Our next frontier is real-time pricing at scale—the Alt Value that powers every trade, loan, and product on the platform.

The Role

The last ten seconds of an auction are the whole product. Hundreds of people who have been watching one card for a week all arrive at once, every one of them refreshing, every one of them bidding. That's this job. You build and scale the high-concurrency bidding and listing systems behind nine figures of annual GMV, and you build the surfaces on top of them. Not one or the other. The low-latency backend logic that resolves a bid and the responsive real-time UI where a collector watches it land are the same feature, and they're both yours.

What You'll Own

• The auction engine. Build and scale the high-concurrency bidding and listing systems that power nine-figure annual GMV. Thundering herd in the closing seconds is a design constraint, not an incident.
• AI-powered liquidity. Develop the next generation of features that use AI to give consignors and sellers instant valuations and upfront liquidity. Being wrong here costs money, which is what makes it interesting.
• Personalized discovery. Use data and machine learning to match unique, one-of-one collectibles to the right buyers. Every item is a cold start; that's the problem.
• Power-seller tooling. Design and launch the management tools that high-frequency sellers and veteran hobbyists actually need. Watch what they do in spreadsheets today, then delete the spreadsheet.
• The whole experience. Backend bid resolution through the responsive UI where the action happens. You own the schema change and the screen it ripples out to.
• The bar. Mentor the team and set the standard for code quality, reliability, and performance.

How You'll Use AI Here

We don't want to hear that you use Claude every day. Everyone does. We want to know what you've built with it. Concretely, in this role:

• Ship instant valuation into the consignor flow — take an Alt Value, a card's condition and provenance language, and recent comps, and produce an upfront liquidity offer a seller can accept in one tap. This is the flagship AI feature on this team, and it is user-facing
• Use vision and language models to enrich listings at scale: parse condition notes, extract attributes from listing photos and descriptions, and turn a messy long tail of one-of-one items into structured data a recommender can actually use
• Build a load-and-concurrency harness you can talk to — generate the closing-seconds bid storm, replay it against a branch, and get back where the write path bent, without spending two days wiring a load test
• Stand up an agent over auction telemetry that watches close windows and flags anomalies — bid latency creeping, a seller's listings underperforming their comps — before a power seller emails us about it
• Put an MCP server over listing, bid, and pricing history so "why did this lot close low" is a sentence, not another one-off query
• Use Claude Code or Cursor as the default way you work through a refactor or a migration, not as autocomplete

If you've built agents, wired up connectors, written skills or MCP servers, or shipped internal tooling your team actually depends on — lead with that. Name the artifact, not the tool.

Bonus: experience with personalization engines, recommendation systems, or AI/ML integrations. Startup experience. You collect, or you have a view on where this market is going.

How We'll Interview You

We'll be specific so you can prepare. Before any of it: download the app, put a card up, make a bid, and try our selling feature. Every round assumes you've used the product, and we expect your point of view to sharpen as you go. For this role, actually sit through the end of a live auction. Notice what the UI tells you and what it's doesn't.

• Recruiter screen — 25 minutes, Google Meet. Come ready to talk about the metric you own today and how you're performing against it, why Alt specifically, and how you're actually using AI. We'll align on comp and answer your questions.
• Hiring manager — 45 minutes, Google Meet. Be ready to go deep on a project you owned end to end — starting with the problem it existed to solve, then the design, then what was yours versus the team's, then the outcome.
• Technical screen — 60 minutes. A hands-on working session on a concurrency problem close to what this role actually does. Think out loud.
• System design — 60 minutes. Design the bidding path under real load. We'll push back on at least one of your choices on purpose — how you take that matters as much as the design.
• Why Alt,- 30 minutes. Exactly what it says. Come with something specific.
• Leore, our founder and CEO — 30 minutes Everyone who joins Alt meets Leore. Come with a point of view on where you'd take auctions first.
• Reference checks — 15 minutes with a former manager(s)

Compensation

$200,000 - $220,000 per year, plus equity for all full-time employees.

What We Offer

• We cover 85% of your medical, dental, and vision, and up to 50% for dependents. HSA/FSA available
• Generous PTO that people actually take
• Parental leave at full salary
• $200/month wellness + $100/month home office stipend
• Free DoorDash Pass membership, because dinner shouldn't be a decision
• Remote-first (for most positions), with WeWork access when you want a room with other humans
• 401(k)
• Alt Equity to all full-time employees