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Research Engineer

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COMPANYAltara

Research Engineer

San Francisco

Engineering

In office

Full-time

We’re building the scientific intelligence platform for the physical world, to accelerate breakthroughs in semiconductors, batteries, advanced materials, aerospace, and beyond. These industries represent trillions in R&D spend, but are still trapped in outdated software. We’re changing that by building the intelligence layer to help scientists and engineers move faster and solve core R&D problems.

We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a category-defining company at the intersection of AI and the physical sciences. And we’re building a world-class team to do it.

We recently raised a seed round led by Greylock, with participation from Neo, BoxGroup, Liquid 2, and top angels including Jeff Dean + leadership at OpenAI and AMD. Our team (ex-Applied Intuition, SpaceX, Warp, Jane Street, Microsoft) works in-person in San Francisco. Our office is located walking distance from 4th and King Caltrain station.

What you’ll do:

  • Translate cutting-edge AI research into production-grade systems.

  • Build evals and benchmarks to rigorously measure model and agent performance across a wide variety of scientific tasks.

  • Develop data ingestion and representation systems that can automatically extract structure and insight from multimodal, messy real-world scientific data (e.g., R&D databases, spreadsheets, images, technical documents, etc).

  • Build both LLM-based agentic systems and implementations beyond LLMs.

  • Act as a technical leader across the organization, helping to define Altara’s technical vision and engineering culture as we scale.

We would love to meet you if you:

  • Care about solving meaningful scientific challenges and disrupting the industry.

  • Have experience at the intersection of research and engineering: comfortable reading papers one hour and debugging data pipelines the next.

  • Have applied AI/ML engineering and research experience, especially with architecting multi-agent workflows, working with multimodal data, or building search and knowledge retrieval systems.

  • Consider yourself product-minded and customer-first.

  • Love to learn, bias toward action, and enjoy taking full ownership of problems end-to-end.

  • Thrive in fast-paced, unstructured environments with evolving requirements.

  • Already use AI tools daily and think critically about how to push their limits.

Bonus points if you have:

  • Shipped 0-to-1 products at a startup, applied AI lab, or other high-growth environments before.

  • Experience or deep curiosity in science.

Learn More about Altara