Principal Software Engineer

About the Company

Astera Neuro is a neuroscience research company deciphering how activity across billions of neurons becomes thoughts, perceptions, and the conscious experience of the world and ourselves. We develop cutting-edge hardware, recording systems, and software, with the goal of enabling the next generation of discoveries about neural circuits, cognition, and behavior.

Responsibilities

• Lead the computational infrastructure for large-scale neuroscience research
• Build stimulus presentation and acquisition systems, including VR environments synchronized with neural recording hardware
• Develop high-throughput pipelines to ingest, process, and store massive, multi-modal neural datasets
• Create dashboards, user interfaces, and experiment-design tools for scientists
• Design cloud-based storage, processing, and sharing infrastructure
• Define the technical roadmap, mentor engineers, and shape interdisciplinary workflows

Requirements

• Proven software engineering fundamentals in production environments
• Experience building real-time or performance-critical systems (game engines, robotics, embedded, or AV pipelines)
• Proficiency in at least two of: Python, C++, C#, or Rust
• Ability to scope and implement systems from open-ended goals
• Experience owning complex systems end-to-end from architecture to reliability
• History of mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives
• Comfort working across the full stack from low-level hardware to cloud infrastructure

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with brain-machine interfaces or neural data acquisition
• Background in machine learning, specifically online/streaming inference
• Experience with data orchestration tools like Airflow or Prefect
• Experience with GPU-accelerated computing (CUDA, Vulkan)
• Familiarity with laboratory hardware integration (DAQ, TTL, SPI)
• Contributions to open-source scientific computing projects