Principal Software Engineer, Neuroscience Platforms

Company Overview

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 Asteras Open Science Policy.

Position Summary

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. You do not need a background in neuroscience to apply; 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.

What You Will Build

• 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.

Who You Are

Required:

• Bachelors 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.

Why Join Us

Join a founding-caliber engineering team building the computational backbone for large-scale neuroscience research. Youll 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!

Required Experience:

Staff IC