Principal Software Engineer, Neuroscience Platforms

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. 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.

Astera Neuro seeks to understand and engineer consciousness. We believe consciousness is the process by which the brain builds a coherent internal model of the world and the self. We aim to understand this model and to develop the technologies to write experience directly into the brain. By combining large-scale neural recording, causal perturbation, and brain-based AI, we seek to move neuroscience from observing correlates of experience to engineering it. The same tools carry direct therapeutic promise for neurological and psychiatric diseases that alter perception, thought, and sense of self. Because the science and tools required do not yet exist, we are assembling a founding team of neuroscientists, theorists, and engineers to create them. We do high-risk, high-reward science in a well-resourced, collaborative environment with competitive pay, and share everything openly under Astera's Open Science Policy.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will lead the computational infrastructure that the next generation of large-scale neuroscience research will depend on. Working closely with scientists and hardware engineers, you will span the full stack of our research systems, including instrument control, data acquisition, and analysis, translating open-ended experimental goals into reliable software. The problems are latency-sensitive, multi-modal, and deeply interdisciplinary. We are looking for an exceptional, pragmatic engineer who enjoys solving hard, interesting problems and picks up the science as they go. As a principal engineer, you will define the technical roadmap across systems, mentor other engineers, and shape how neuroscience and engineering work together at Astera.

• Build stimulus presentation and acquisition systems, including VR environments in Unity, Unreal, or comparable frameworks, that synchronize peripheral streams (eye tracking, displays, haptics) with high-throughput neural recording hardware to millisecond precision.

• Build high-throughput pipelines to ingest, process, and store massive, multi-modal neural datasets (electrophysiology, calcium imaging, behavior), with versioned data formats, automated QC, and clear metadata standards.

• Build dashboards, user interfaces, and experiment-design tools that let scientists interact with complex data and run experiments seamlessly.

• Build cloud-based storage, processing, and sharing infrastructure that supports distributed teams and large-scale datasets.

Required:

• Bachelor's degree (or equivalent experience) with 12+ years of experience in computer science, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, neuroscience, physics, or a related field; graduate work or research experience in neuroscience or a related discipline is a plus but not required.

• Exceptional software engineering fundamentals, proven in production: you write clean, testable, well-documented code and approach system design thoughtfully.

• The range and independence to take a rough idea or open-ended goal, scope a path to a working system, and move forward without waiting for a complete spec.

• A deep intuition for latency, hardware limits, and data bottlenecks, earned building real-time or performance-critical systems in production (game engines, robotics, embedded systems, audio/video pipelines, or similar).

• Proficiency in at least two of: Python, C++, C#, Rust.

• Intellectual curiosity, collaborative instincts, and eagerness to learn the science around you.

• A track record of owning complex systems end-to-end, from architecture and implementation through operational reliability, and of making and defending technical tradeoffs across performance, maintainability, and team velocity.

• Comfort working across the full stack, from low-level hardware interfaces to cloud infrastructure, with the ability to build and iterate on human-facing research systems with speed and taste.

• A history of mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives, with the judgment to set technical direction across teams.

Preferred/Nice to Have:

• Familiarity with brain-machine interfaces, neural data acquisition systems, neural data formats and analysis tools.

• Background in machine learning, particularly online/streaming inference or neural decoding.

• Experience designing data pipelines at scale (Airflow, Prefect, or similar orchestration tools).

• Experience with GPU-accelerated computing (CUDA, Vulkan compute shaders).

• Familiarity with laboratory hardware integration (DAQ systems, TTL synchronization, serial/SPI protocols).

• Contributions to open-source neuroscience or scientific computing projects.

Join a founding-caliber engineering team building the computational backbone for large-scale neuroscience research. You'll define technical direction across systems, work shoulder-to-shoulder with the scientists and hardware engineers who depend on what you build, and shape how software and science come together at Astera as the team grows.

Astera Neuro provides a comprehensive benefits package and total compensation that is competitive and commensurate with the level of experience and qualifications.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity and inclusion!