Senior Staff Software Engineer - Washington - Altana AI

Description

Brooklyn, NY; Washington, D.C.; Boston, MA; San Francisco, CA

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.

Opportunity at Altana

The Engineering team is responsible for building out the platforms, APIs, 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.

Responsibilities

• Ingest product requirements, define technical requirements, and design practical, iterative technology designs that achieve our product and technical goals.
• Work with the product manager to develop implementation plans against our technical product roadmaps.
• Personally maintain, develop, and deploy our customer‑facing workflows to create and support our overall product 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, holding 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 mature 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 to keep the team focused on outcomes while delivering sustainable and consistent code.

About You

• BS or MS degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
• 12+ years of real‑world professional experience writing back‑end or data‑driven software in demanding environments.
• Deployed production code and services to cloud‑hosted environments.
• Demonstrated experience delivering incremental releases from proof‑of‑concept to MVP to production.
• Self‑starter with experience working on large, complex problems.
• Cares deeply about engineering excellence, clean code, and knowledge‑sharing.
• Has experience taking over codebases and making them your own, carrying forward with new feature development.
• Master of prioritizing and picking your area of focus intentionally.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Experience leading other engineers on complex projects.

Nice to Have

• Experience with container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience using workflow orchestration technologies like Temporal.

Technologies we love to use at Altana

• Languages: Python, TypeScript, SQL
• Datastores: Postgres, Databricks and OpenSearch

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

US Salary Range and Benefits

$225,000 - $265,000 USD

The salary range is a good faith statement of the minimum and maximum levels of the annual base 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; they 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: 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: Full suite of medical, vision, and dental benefits with generous employer contributions, including a high deductible health plan that is 100% employer paid and an employer contribution to an HSA. A Flexible Spending Account (FSA) option is also available.
• Supplemental Benefits: Life, short‑ and long‑term disability, and AD&D insurance coverage, all at no cost to you.
• 401(k) Savings: Guideline 401(k) retirement savings program.
• Commuter Benefits: Pre‑tax funds for public transit or parking.
• Wellness: Free premium subscription to Calm, the #1 app for meditation, sleep, and mindfulness.
• Pet Insurance: 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: Pre‑tax funds for childcare expenses.

Our Values

• Trust: 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.
• Resilience: Our work must withstand challenges, evolve with conditions, and ensure reliability over time. Resilience guides how we respond when things don't go to plan – we adapt, support each other, and 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. We foster a workplace where people can thrive.
• Courage: Courage unlocks seemingly impossible opportunities for our customers. It drives us to make bold moves, tackle complex network problems, and approach hard conversations with a growth mindset.

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.