Software Engineer

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

Job summary

Altara Technologies, Inc. is seeking an experienced engineer to architect and build the foundations of their core product in San Francisco. The ideal candidate will have a background in shipping innovative products in high-growth environments and possess a strong understanding of AI and its applications in science. This role requires both technical leadership and mentorship to help shape Altara's engineering culture. Join us to disrupt the industry and solve meaningful scientific challenges.

Qualifications

• Experience in shipping 0-to-1 products in high-growth environments.
• Ability to balance user needs with technical trade-offs.
• Familiarity with AI tools and critical thinking about their applications.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build early foundations of Altara’s core product.
• Ship end-to-end features across the stack.
• Develop systems for extracting insights from scientific data.
• Lead technical direction and mentor team members.

Skills

Product-first engineering mindset

AI/ML engineering and research

Mentorship and technical leadership

Data ingestion and representation

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 These industries represent trillions in R&D spend, but are still trapped in outdated software.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.

We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a category-defining company at the intersection of AI and the physical sciences. And we’re building a world-class team to do it.

We recently raised a seed round led by Greylock, with participation from Neo, BoxGroup, Liquid 2, and top angels including Jeff Dean + leadership at OpenAI and AMD. Our team (ex-Applied Intuition, SpaceX, Warp, Jane Street, Microsoft) works in-person in San Francisco. Our office is located walking distance from 4th and King Caltrain station.

What you’ll do:

• Architect and build the early foundations of Altara’s core product and infrastructure.
• Ship end-to-end features across the stack, balancing speed, scope, and user experience.
• 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, mentoring top talent and helping 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, not just building another SaaS tool.
• Have shipped 0-to-1 products at a startup, applied AI lab, or other high-growth environments before.
• Consider yourself a product-first engineer - you start from the user problem, not the technology, and make smart technical tradeoffs to deliver impact fast.
• 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:

• Worked at an early stage startup, founded a company, or plan to start one someday.
• Applied AI/ML engineering and research experience, especially with building search and ranking tools, LLM-based applications, agentic workflows, and computer vision.
• Experience or deep curiosity in science.

Learn More about Altara

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