Principal Software Engineer

Emeryville HQ

Salary: $300K - $600K
Level: Principal
Work type: On-site · Emeryville

Not stated in the posting: visa.

Open. First seen 2 October 2026.

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About the role

About Astera

Astera Institute's standard text

Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. We believe the coming years will bring an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advancement as exponential progress in AI converges with central advances in other fields to accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive progress.

We have committed a $3.5B endowment to that work and fit the form of our support to the function it serves: grants, investments, and in-house research programs. We accept meaningful risk in the research we back and expect some of it to fail because transformative ideas are rarely the ones already proven. Our projects, and the foundation itself, operate like high-velocity startups, with a high performance bar and competitive compensation to match.

Astera Institute's standard text

We are searching for leaders who are compelled by the challenge of driving high-impact change in the way science is funded, conducted, and communicated. You can read more about our mission, vision, and programming at astera.org/vision.

Position Summary

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

This role spans a broad spectrum of activities:

Define and architect high-performance infrastructure for training large-scale models and running complex simulations.
Design and optimize custom RL environments informed by neuroscience.
Set the organizational standard for clean, fast, production-grade code that boosts our research velocity.
Turn research prototypes into scalable production systems.
Identify and resolve the most critical and ambiguous technical bottlenecks, from low-level optimization to high-level strategy, to unblock the research team.

Qualifications

High-Velocity Craftsmanship: You set the bar for 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 proven success architecting complex systems from scratch. You understand multi-year 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, mastering them quickly, and guiding others through them.
Mastery of Hard Problems: You have a track record of leading the resolution of difficult engineering challenges, whether it is massive scale distributed systems or kernel-level optimization. You do not shy away from what your peers consider hardcore.