Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer

Altana is the network for trusted trade. Our AI-powered product network empowers governments and businesses to build a more resilient and secure global economy while keeping trade flowing.

The Opportunity at Altana

The Engineering team is responsible for building out the product for bringing this vision to life. We are creating a platform fundamentally driven by AI, which scales to a massive trove of data, and a diverse customer base; it is a complex system that will stretch engineering in many directions.

Shipping products that customers actually adopt, not just products that ship, takes a particular kind of engineering practice. It means starting inside the customer's workflow rather than at the ticket. It means treating every release as a hypothesis you can prove or disprove. It means reaching for AI as a primary building block, not a feature you bolt on at the end. And it means owning a product end-to-end, from the first conversation through the telemetry six months later.

As a Staff Engineer at Altana, that's the work and you'll lead others doing it. You'll embed with product and design, get on calls with users, form hypotheses about where the real pain is, and lead a small team turning those hypotheses into shipped, adopted products. You'll measure your work in customer outcomes, not commits.

You Will

• Spend real time with customers. Sit alongside them in their workflows, watch where they get stuck, and translate what you learn into product bets your team is willing to ship behind.
• Partner with the product team to decide what to build, not just how. Form hypotheses about customer value, design the smallest experiment that could prove them out, and learn fast. Push back on briefs that aren't grounded in evidence.
• Take new product surfaces from 0 to 1. Pitch, prototype, ship, and drive adoption with real users. You are as fluent in "did this land?" as you are in "is this maintainable?"
• Build AI-native by default. LLMs, agents, evals, retrieval, and modern AI tooling are first-class building blocks in your stack, not bolt-ons. You make principled choices about where AI changes the product equation and where it doesn't.
• Own end-to-end outcomes. From the first customer conversation to telemetry on the dashboard six months later — including the architecture and instrumentation choices that make that telemetry meaningful.
• Set the technical bar for your team. Review designs and code with a high standard for quality, simplicity, and customer impact, and a low tolerance for engineering work that can't be traced back to a customer outcome.
• Mentor engineers in customer-centric, hypothesis-driven product development. Help them build the instincts to talk to users, run experiments, and tell when a feature is done because it's loved, not because the ticket is closed.
• Drive technical decision-making with a bias toward shipping. Choose practical, iterative designs that get a working version in front of customers fast, then evolve them as you learn.

You Have

• You've deployed production code and services to cloud-hosted environments.
• You have demonstrated experience delivering incremental releases from proof-of-concept to MVP to production.
• Self-starter with demonstrated experience working on large, complex problems.
• You care deeply about engineering excellence, clean code, and knowledge-sharing.
• You have strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Experience leading other engineers on complex projects.

Nice to have, but not required

• Experience with Python Machine Learning toolsets (Numpy, Pandas, Dedupe).
• Experience with container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.

Technologies we love to use at Altana

• Languages: Python, PySpark
• Tools: Docker, Git, Kubernetes, Swagger/OpenAPI, AWS/Azure, MLFlow, Celery
• Datastores: Databricks and Delta Lakes

This role can be based in any of our Altana hub locations, with hybrid work flexibility: New York City, Boston, MA, Washington D.C., San Francisco, CA, London, UK

US Salary Range and Benefits

$175,000 - $230,000 USD

The salary range, to the extent specified for this role, is a good faith statement of the minimum and maximum levels of the annual based salary for the position. The base salary offered to a successful candidate will depend on a wide range of compensation factors, including, but not limited to, work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Altana's total compensation package. Altana also offers either a discretionary bonus or a variable compensation plan depending on the role. Additionally, Altana offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including:

• Flexible Time Off: Altana operates with a Flexible Time Off (FTO) policy that gives you agency over your own time off so you can maximize your work-life balance.
• Parental Leave: We offer industry leading Paid Parental Leave (PPL), providing 14 weeks of leave for non-birthing, adoptive, and foster parents and up to 26 weeks of leave for birthing parents, all paid at 100% of your base salary.
• Health Benefits: We have a full suite of medical, vision, and dental benefits with generous employer contributions, designed to give you flexibility and choice for your individual health situation. Our high deductible health plan is 100% employer paid for employees and supplemented with an employer contribution to your Health Savings Account (HSA). There is also a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) option.
• Supplemental Benefits: Altana provides life, short- and long-term disability, and AD&D insurance coverage, all at no cost to you, so you know that you and your loved ones are covered in case of an emergency.
• 401(k) Savings: Save for and invest in your future using our Guideline 401(k) retirement savings program.
• Commuter Benefits: Save money on your commute by setting aside pre-tax funds for public transit or parking!
• Wellness: Because we value mental and emotional health, every Altana employee has access to a free premium subscription to Calm, the #1 app for meditation, sleep, and mindfulness.
• Pet Insurance: Pets are family too! Keep them healthy with Wishbone insurance and / or our Total Pet vet service and telehealth discount plan.
• Employee Assistance Program: Free access to confidential personal support.
• Dependent Care FSA: You will have access to a Dependent Care FSA, which allows you to set aside pre-tax funds for childcare expenses

The recruiter assigned to this role can share more information about the specific compensation and benefit details associated with this role during the hiring process.

Our Values

Our values are the core beliefs that shape who we are, what we stand for, and how we behave. They form the foundation of Altana's culture and integrity and guide how we hire, design, build, and connect with each other and our customers.

• Trust: Our customers and partners entrust us with missions of the highest importance. We honor that by keeping our word, meeting commitments, and ensuring every action we take reinforces confidence in us. We rely on each other to deliver, to speak openly, and to hold ourselves accountable.
• Resilience: In a world of uncertainty and complexity, our work must withstand challenges, evolve with conditions, and ensure reliability over time. Resilience is both how we operate and what we deliver. It's how we respond when things don't go to plan –– we adapt, we support each other, and we keep moving forward.
• Stewardship: We are stewards of every mission we touch. Because our work impacts lives and futures, we hold ourselves accountable to delivering mission impact and never compromising. Our responsibility extends beyond individual projects to the broader system of global trade. We believe that stewardship starts from within so that we can bring focus, creativity, and excellence to our work. Each of us is personally responsible for fostering a workplace where people can thrive. And we are stewards of the greater good of the company. By holding ourselves and each other accountable, we build a culture of innovation and collective success that