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Principal Software Engineer, Neuroscience Platforms

Astera Institute· Neuro
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Alameda$300k - $450kFull-timePosted 3mo ago

About the role

Lead the computational infrastructure for large-scale neuroscience research, spanning instrument control, data acquisition, and analysis; define technical roadmap, mentor engineers, and collaborate with scientists and hardware engineers to build end-to-end research systems.

Responsibilities

  • Build stimulus presentation and acquisition systems, including VR environments in Unity, Unreal, or comparable frameworks, that synchronize peripheral streams 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.

Qualifications

  • 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.

Skills

Required:Software engineering fundamentalsLatency-sensitive system designProgramming languagesFull-stack proficiencyMentoring/leadership

Benefits

  • Astera provides a comprehensive benefits package and total compensation that is competitive and commensurate with the level of experience and qualifications.
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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