Principal Software Engineer, Neuroscience Platforms

The role

You will lead computational infrastructure for large-scale neuroscience research. You will build stimulus presentation systems, high-throughput data pipelines, and cloud-based storage infrastructure.

What you will do

• Build stimulus presentation and acquisition systems including VR environments.
• Synchronize peripheral streams with high-throughput neural recording hardware.
• Build high-throughput pipelines to ingest, process, and store multi-modal neural datasets.
• Build dashboards, user interfaces, and experiment-design tools.
• Build cloud-based storage, processing, and sharing infrastructure.
• Define the technical roadmap across systems.
• Mentor other engineers.
• Shape how neuroscience and engineering work together.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's degree (or equivalent experience) with 12+ years of experience in computer science, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, neuroscience, physics, or a related field
• Exceptional software engineering fundamentals in production
• Ability to scope a path to a working system from a rough idea
• Intuition for latency, hardware limits, and data bottlenecks from building real-time or performance-critical systems
• Proficiency in at least two of: Python, C++, C#, Rust
• Intellectual curiosity, collaborative instincts, and eagerness to learn the science
• Track record of owning complex systems end-to-end
• Comfort working across the full stack from low-level hardware interfaces to cloud infrastructure
• History of mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives

Nice to have

• Graduate work or research experience in neuroscience or a related discipline
• 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

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits package
• Total compensation that is competitive and commensurate with the level of experience and qualifications

About the company

Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. Astera Neuro seeks to understand and engineer consciousness by combining large-scale neural recording, causal perturbation, and brain-based AI.