Staff Software Engineer

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. The Opportunity at Altana The Engineering team is responsible for building out the product 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. Shipping products that customers actually adopt, not just products that ship, takes a particular kind of engineering practice. It means starting inside the customer’s workflow rather than at the ticket. It means treating every release as a hypothesis you can prove or disprove. It means reaching for AI as a primary building block, not a feature you bolt on at the end. And it means owning a product end‑to‑end, from the first conversation through the telemetry six months later. As a Staff Engineer at Altana, that’s the work and you’ll lead others doing it. You’ll embed with product and design, get on calls with users, form hypotheses about where the real pain is, and lead a small team turning those hypotheses into shipped, adopted products. You’ll measure your work in customer outcomes, not commits. You Will Spend real time with customers. Sit alongside them in their workflows, watch where they get stuck, and translate what you learn into product bets your team is willing to ship behind. Partner with the product team to decide what to build, not just how . Form hypotheses about customer value, design the smallest experiment that could prove them out, and learn fast. Push back on briefs that aren’t grounded in evidence. Take new product surfaces from 0 to 1. Pitch, prototype, ship, and drive adoption with real users. You are as fluent in “did this land?” as you are in “is this maintainable?” Build AI‑native by default . LLMs, agents, evals, retrieval, and modern AI tooling are first‑class building blocks in your stack, not bolt‑ons. You make principled choices about where AI changes the product equation and where it doesn’t. Own end‑to‑end outcomes . From the first customer conversation to telemetry on the dashboard six months later — including the architecture and instrumentation choices that make that telemetry meaningful. Set the technical bar for your team . Review designs and code with a high standard for quality, simplicity, and customer impact, and a low tolerance for engineering work that can't be traced back to a customer outcome. Mentor engineers in customer‑centric, hypothesis‑driven product development . Help them build the instincts to talk to users, run experiments, and tell when a feature is done because it's loved, not because the ticket is closed. Drive technical decision‑making with a bias toward shipping . Choose practical, iterative designs that get a working version in front of customers fast, then evolve them as you learn. You Have You’ve deployed production code and services to cloud-hosted environments. You have demonstrated experience delivering incremental releases from proof-of-concept to MVP to production. Self-starter with demonstrated experience working on large, complex problems. You care deeply about engineering excellence, clean code, and knowledge-sharing. You have strong written and verbal communication skills. Experience leading other engineers on complex projects. Nice to have, but not required Experience with Python Machine Learning toolsets (Numpy, Pandas, Dedupe). Experience with container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes. Technologies we love to use at Altana Languages: Python, PySpark Tools: Docker, Git, Kubernetes, Swagger/OpenAPI, AWS/Azure, MLFlow, Celery Datastores: Databricks and Delta Lakes This role can be based in any of our Altana hub locations, with hybrid work flexibility: New York City, Boston, MA, Washington D.C., San Francisco, CA, London, UK US Salary Range and Bene