Senior Software Engineer, Auctions
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Role details
Tech stack
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Job description
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., We donât want to hear that you use Claude every day. Everyone does. We want to know what youâve built with it. Concretely, in this role:
- Ship instant valuation into the consignor flow - take an Alt Value, a cardâs 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 sellerâs listings underperforming their comps - before a power seller emails us about it
- Put an MCP server over listing, bid, and pricing history so âwhy did this lot close lowâ 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 youâve 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.
Requirements
- 5+ years building and scaling complex applications - Python, Postgres, AWS or comparable cloud infrastructure.
- Modern frontend mastery. Deep experience with React, TypeScript, and building high-performance real-time UIs. Real-time is the operative word: this is not a CRUD screen.
- Reliability under pressure. A track record of building systems that stay up when the stakes and the traffic are highest. Youâve been paged during the worst possible ten minutes.
- AI pragmatism. Youâve taken LLMs or computer vision models and turned them into practical, user-facing features that solved a real business problem. Not a demo.
- Product instincts. You donât build whatâs on the ticket. You understand the collector mindset and build things that delight them - and you can explain the why behind past work before you explain the how.
- High agency. You thrive where youâre expected to find the highest-leverage work and go execute it without a hand-holding manual.
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.
Benefits & conditions
- $200K - $220K * Offers Equity
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., * 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; thatâs 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., Compensation: $200,000 - $220,000 per year, plus equity for all full-time employees., For full-time Employees
- 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 shouldnât 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
Compensation Range: $200K - $220K
About the company
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Recruiter screen - 25 minutes, Google Meet. Come ready to talk about the metric you own today and how youâre performing against it, why Alt specifically, and how youâre actually using AI. Weâll align on comp and answer your questions.
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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 teamâs, then the outcome.
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