Senior Staff Software Engineer

Company: Autoscience Institute
Location: San Mateo CA (in office 4 days per week; flexible hours)
Compensation: $300000 - $350000 competitive equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: H-1B transfers TN and O-1 sponsored

Autoscience Institute builds AI systems that autonomously conduct AI research. It announced the first AI agent to autonomously create peer-reviewed literature (ICLR 2025 Workshops) and its commercial product Mira is deployed at top-three global quant trading firms delivering 20% model performance gains.

Founded in 2024 Autoscience has about 10 people and raised $14M from General Catalyst Perplexity Fund S32 MaC Ventures and Toyota Ventures with a Series A in progress.

Autoscience is hiring Senior / Staff Software Engineers (5 years) to join a tiny elite team as high-leverage ICs writing production Python that powers recursive self-improvement for Mira. You have owned complex projects end to end write pristine code and operate without hand-holding at a company where iteration speed is the competitive advantage. As one of the first senior engineering hires you will shape technical direction.

• Build and optimize the recursive self-improvement pipeline for Mira.
• Work on the agentic discovery search system and the post-training stack used for customer-specific models.
• Write high-performance Python that speeds up autonomous research workflows.
• Turn experimental ideas into production systems with researchers and engineers.
• Shape architecture and technical direction.

• 5 years of software engineering experience
• Ownership of complex projects end to end
• Excellent production Python
• Backend and ML infrastructure experience (GCP a plus)
• Ability to work in the San Mateo office 4 days a week

Python Google Cloud Platform backend infrastructure production systems ML infrastructure AI observability

REVENUE: 17% of first-year salary. Est. fee per hire $51K-$60K; 6 seat(s) up to $332K if all filled.

TARGET COMPANIES (suggested): Jane Street Citadel DeepMind OpenAI Anthropic Two Sigma.

BEST-FIT CANDIDATE: 5 yrs; pristine production Python; end-to-end complex ownership; ML infra; visa: H-1B transfer TN O-1; location: San Mateo 4 days.