Senior Software Engineer

About Astera:

Astera is a private foundation with a $2.5B endowment on a mission to steer science and technology toward an abundant future for all. Unlike traditional foundations, we operate like a high-velocity startup with unprecedented access to computational resources and complete freedom from funding pressures or profit motives. This allows us to focus on ambitious goals and attract incredibly creative scientists and engineers from leading academic institutions and from frontier AI labs.

Obelisk is our large-scale AI research program, pursuing a neuroscience-informed approach to engineering AGI. This is not yet-another-lab scaling LLMs in a hope of achieving general intelligence. We are integrating neuroscience, AI, and bioengineering to understand and digitally model the architecture of the human brain.

Position Summary:

We are looking for an ambitious Senior Software Engineer to help us reverse-engineer the human brain.

This role spans a broad spectrum of activities:

• Architect high-performance infrastructure for training large-scale models and running complex simulations.

• Design and optimize custom RL environments informed by neuroscience.

• Write clean, fast, production-grade code that boosts our research velocity.

• Turn research prototypes into scalable production systems.

• Tackle any technical bottleneck, from low-level optimization to high-level system design, to unblock the research team.

Qualifications:

• High-Velocity Craftsmanship: You produce clean, maintainable, and well-tested code at a startup pace. You know how to balance engineering rigor with the need to iterate quickly on research prototypes.

• System Architecture Intuition: You have deep experience architecting complex systems from scratch. You understand the trade-offs, and you can design infrastructure that survives the chaos of research.

• Extreme Adaptability: You might be an expert in distributed systems today, but you are ready to become a novice in neuroscience tomorrow. You have a track record of diving into complex domains and mastering them quickly.

• Mastery of Hard Problems: You have a track record of tackling difficult engineering challenges, whether it is massive scale distributed systems or low-level optimization. You do not shy away from what your peers consider hardcore.

Location & Visa:

• This role is in-person in Emeryville, CA.

• Visa sponsorship may be available for qualified candidates.

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