Staff Software Engineer

AI can be a powerful tool for good in the world – at Altana we apply AI to the world’s largest organized body of supply chain data to power a more resilient, more secure, and more sustainable model of global commerce. Our customers connect to the Altana network to build resilience for critical industries and infrastructure, automate and safeguard cross-border trade, transform insurance underwriting, protect national security, combat modern slave labor, disrupt fentanyl trafficking, and ensure that their products are sustainable.

Altana is backed by leading investors and used by the world’s most important organizations, including Lloyd’s, Maersk, multiple government agencies across the US, UK, EU, Singapore, and Australia, General Atomics, Boston Scientific, and more. We are building a global platform connecting the public and private sectors into an AI-powered network for building trusted supply chains. We operate in accordance with our values : we focus on value creation, not capture; we foster diversity and embrace difference; we embrace reality; we get things done; we amaze our clients. When you join Altana, you’ll be joining a vibrant, collaborative team working together to solve complex problems with the potential for global societal impact.

The Opportunity at Altana

The Engineering team is responsible for building out the platforms, API’s, services, workflows, and logical architectures 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. You’ll work closely with our Data Scientists on projects to analyze and observe world-scale datasets, write code that can scale to produce never-before-seen insights, and construct APIs to deliver our product vision.

You Will 

• Ingest product requirements, define technical requirements, and design practical, iterative technology designs that achieve our product and technical goals.


• Work with your product manager to develop implementation plans against our technical product roadmaps.


• Personally maintain, develop, and deploy services creating and supporting our overall architecture.


• Analyze and propose technical solutions to invent, enable, and enhance our product offerings.


• Be responsible for automating, testing, and deploying your own and your team’s work.


• Review the code and technical designs authored by your team members, and hold a high bar for quality.


• Mentor developers and help them level up their skills.


• Be responsible for the technical excellence of day-to-day work of a team of engineers and ensure that the team’s deliverables are maturing along the defined roadmap.


• Drive technical decision-making and problem-solving across the team, ensuring solutions are efficient, scalable, and maintainable.


• Identify technical and operational gaps for the team and create plans and work items to address them.


• Serve as the domain expert for a portion of the product surface area, while holding a firm technical understanding for other areas as well.


• Cooperate with team leads and managers in order to keep the team focused on outcomes while delivering sustainable and consistent code.

You Have

• BS or MS degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.


• 7+ years of real-world professional experience writing back end or data-driven software in demanding environments.


• 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 experience with taking over codebases and making them your own, carrying forward with new feature development.


• You are a master of prioritizing and picking your area of focus intentionally


• You have strong written and verbal communication skills.


• Experience leading other engineers on complex projects.

• 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

$190,000 - $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.

Why it’s great to work at Altana

• We love to collaborate, and we win as a team!


• We are committed to engineering excellence


• We value personal and professional development


• We learn from diverse backgrounds and perspectives


• We impact the world, from enabling developing countries to identifying drug traffickers

At Altana, we believe that a diverse workforce enables greater creativity, performance, and adaptability. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome you to join us as you are. Our employment opportunities and decisions are based on business needs and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, family care or medical leave status, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by the laws or regulations in the areas in which we operate. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type, in any situation.

Offers related to employment at Altana will come from an Altana.ai email address. We will never ask for payment as part of the interview or onboarding process.