# Principal Software Engineer, Neuroscience Platforms

**Company:** [Astera](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/astera)
**Location:** Emeryville, CA
**Role:** ML Engineering
**Salary:** $200k – $350k/yr
**Experience:** 7+ years
**Skills:** Python, C++, C#, Rust, Unity, Unreal, CUDA, Airflow, Prefect, Gpu Computing, Daq Systems
**Posted:** 2026-06-29

> Lead development of computational infrastructure for large-scale neuroscience research, building real-time stimulus/acquisition systems, high-throughput data pipelines, and cloud tools. Requires exceptional full-stack engineering with real-time systems experience; neuroscience background not required.

## Job Description

## What You Will Build
- Stimulus presentation and acquisition systems, including VR environments built in Unity, Unreal, or comparable frameworks, that synchronize peripheral streams (eye tracking, displays, haptics) with high-throughput neural recording hardware to millisecond precision.
- High-throughput pipelines to ingest, process, and store massive, multi-modal neural datasets (electrophysiology, calcium imaging, behavior), with versioned data formats, automated QC, and clear metadata standards.
- Dashboards, user interfaces, and experiment-design tools that let scientists interact with complex data and run experiments seamlessly.
- Cloud-based storage, processing and sharing infrastructure that supports distributed teams and large-scale datasets.

## What We Are Looking For
- Exceptional software engineering fundamentals, proven in production. You write clean, testable, well-documented code and approach system design thoughtfully.
- The range and independence to take a rough idea or open-ended goal, scope a path to a working system, and move forward without waiting for a complete spec.
- A deep intuition for latency, hardware limits, and data bottlenecks, earned building real-time or performance-critical systems in production (game engines, robotics, embedded systems, audio/video pipelines, or similar).
- Proficiency in at least two of: Python, C++, C#, Rust.
- Intellectually curious, collaborative, and eager to learn the science around you.
- A track record of owning complex systems end-to-end, from architecture and implementation through operational reliability, and of making and defending technical tradeoffs across performance, maintainability, and team velocity.
- Comfort working across the full stack, from low-level hardware interfaces to cloud infrastructure, with the ability to build and iterate on human-facing research systems with speed and taste.
- A history of mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives, with the judgment to set technical direction across teams.

## Bonus
- Familiarity with brain-machine interfaces, neural data acquisition systems, neural data formats and analysis tools.
- Background in machine learning, particularly online/streaming inference or neural decoding.
- Experience designing data pipelines at scale (Airflow, Prefect, or similar orchestration tools).
- Experience with GPU-accelerated computing (CUDA, Vulkan compute shaders).
- Familiarity with laboratory hardware integration (DAQ systems, TTL synchronization, serial/SPI protocols).
- Contributions to open-source neuroscience or scientific computing projects.

## Education
Backgrounds in computer science, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, neuroscience, physics, or related fields are all welcome. Graduate work or research experience in neuroscience or a related discipline is a plus but not required.

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