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# Principal Software Engineer

- **Company:** Astera Institute
- **Location:** Emeryville, CA, United States
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Distributed Systems, Systems Architecture
- **Published:** November 7, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.juju.com/job/28_25197_fd890ec16cf721ede1a785bb8569e7b2

## About the Role

* 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.

## Description

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.