Senior / Staff Software Engineer

San Mateo, United States
Full-time
Visa Sponsorship

About the role

We are looking for a Senior / Staff Software Engineer with 5+ years of experience to join a tiny, elite team building AI systems that autonomously conduct AI research. You'll be a high-leverage IC writing production Python code that powers recursive self-improvement for our commercial product, Mira — already deployed at top-three global quant trading firms and delivering 20%+ model performance gains. We need someone who has owned complex projects end-to-end, writes pristine code, and can operate without handholding at a company where iteration speed is the competitive advantage. This is a ground-floor opportunity at an 8-person team backed by General Catalyst with $14M in seed funding and a Series A in progress.

What will you be doing?

  • Building and optimizing the recursive self-improvement pipeline for Mira, our commercial autonomous research agent

  • Working on the agentic discovery search system and robust post-training stack used to train and fine-tune customer-specific models

  • Writing high-performance Python algorithms focused on shaving performance and increasing speed of autonomous research workflows

  • Collaborating cross-functionally with researchers and engineers to translate experimental ideas into production systems

  • Shaping technical direction and architecture decisions as one of the first senior engineering hires at the company

About Autoscience Institute

We build AI systems that autonomously conduct AI research. We just announced the first AI agent to autonomously create peer reviewed literature (ICLR 2025 Workshops).

We recently raised $14M from General Catalyst, Perplexity Fund, S32, MaC Ventures and Toyota Ventures.

Required skills

Python
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Backend Infrastructure
Production Systems
ML Infrastructure
AI Observability

Other roles at Autoscience Institute

Interested?

Let me introduce you to the founders.

Skip the process

Job details

Salary

$300,000 - $350,000

Location

San Mateo, United States

Experience

5+ years

Company

NameAutoscience Institute
IndustryAI
Team Size10

Funding

Total raised

$14M

Last stage

Seed

Investors

General Catalyst
Toyota Ventures
PPerplexity Fund
MMaC Ventures
SS32

Founders

Eliot Cowan

Eliot Cowan

Co-Founder & CEO

LinkedIn

What happens next.

No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.

01

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

02

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

03

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.