Research Engineer

About the Company

Altara is creating an intelligence platform for the physical world, aimed at helping scientists and engineers accelerate breakthroughs across semiconductors, batteries, advanced materials, aerospace, and similar industries. The company is focused on modernizing software for sectors with massive spending and building the intelligence layer that supports faster research, development, and manufacturing.

Altara sees this as a rare opportunity to build a defining company where AI meets the physical sciences. The team is assembling a high-caliber organization to make that vision real.

The company recently completed a seed financing round led by Greylock, with support from Neo, BoxGroup, Liquid 2, and angel investors including Jeff Dean as well as leaders from OpenAI and AMD. The team includes people with backgrounds from Applied Intuition, SpaceX, Warp, Jane Street, and Microsoft, and the company operates in person in San Francisco. The office is within walking distance of the 4th and King Caltrain station.

What You'll Be Doing

• Turn advanced AI research ideas into systems that are reliable enough for production use.
• Create evaluation methods and benchmarks that accurately track model and agent quality across many scientific workflows.
• Design data ingestion and data representation pipelines that can pull structure and useful insights from messy, multimodal scientific information such as R&D databases, spreadsheets, images, and technical documents.
• Develop both LLM-powered agent systems and other solutions that go beyond large language models.
• Provide technical leadership across the company and help shape Altara’s engineering direction and culture as the team grows.

What We're Looking For

• A strong motivation to solve important scientific problems and help transform the industry.
• Hands-on experience that bridges research and engineering, including the ability to read papers and then debug data pipelines in the same day.
• Background in applied AI/ML engineering and research, particularly in multi-agent systems, multimodal data work, or search and retrieval systems.
• A product-oriented mindset with a strong focus on customer needs.
• A bias toward action, curiosity, and the ability to take complete ownership of problems from start to finish.
• Comfort working in fast-moving, less structured environments where priorities and requirements evolve.
• Regular use of AI tools and the ability to think critically about how to stretch their capabilities.

Bonus Experience

• Prior experience launching 0-to-1 products in a startup, applied AI lab, or similarly fast-growing environment.
• Existing experience in science or a strong curiosity to learn more about it.

Additional Information

This is an in-office role based in San Francisco, California.

The company emphasizes an environment where team members work closely together on-site.

Reference materials mentioned by the company include a video, a blog post, and a TechCrunch article.

The company also invites candidates to follow its updates on LinkedIn and X.