Lead Software Engineer

AI can be a powerful tool for good in the world – at Altana we apply AI to the world’s largest organized body of supply chain data to power a more resilient, more secure, and more sustainable model of global commerce. Our customers connect to the Altana network to build resilience for critical industries and infrastructure, automate and safeguard cross-border trade, transform insurance underwriting, protect national security, combat modern slave labor, disrupt fentanyl trafficking, and ensure that their products are sustainable.

Altana is backed by leading investors and used by the world’s most important organizations, including Lloyd’s, Maersk, multiple government agencies across the US, UK, EU, Singapore, and Australia, General Atomics, Boston Scientific, and more. We are building a global platform connecting the public and private sectors into an AI-powered network for building trusted supply chains. We operate in accordance with our values: we focus on value creation, not capture; we foster diversity and embrace difference; we embrace reality; we get things done; we amaze our clients. When you join Altana, you’ll be joining a vibrant, collaborative team working together to solve complex problems with the potential for global societal impact.

The Opportunity at Altana

The Engineering team is responsible for building out the platforms, API’s, services, workflows, and logical architectures 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.  You’ll work closely with our Data Scientists on projects to analyze and observe world-scale datasets, write code that can scale to produce never-before-seen insights, and construct APIs to deliver our product vision.

You Will 

• Ingest product requirements, define technical requirements, and design practical, iterative technology designs that achieve our product and technical goals.


• Work with your product manager to develop implementation plans against our technical product roadmaps.


• Personally maintain, develop, and deploy services creating and supporting our overall architecture.


• Analyze and propose technical solutions to invent, enable, and enhance our product offerings.


• Be responsible for automating, testing, and deploying your own and your team’s work.


• Review the code and technical designs authored by your team members while holding a high bar for quality.


• Mentor developers and help them level up their skills.


• Be responsible for the day-to-day work of a team of engineers and ensure that the team is progressing along the defined roadmap.


• Drive technical decision-making and problem-solving across the team, ensuring solutions are efficient, scalable, and maintainable.


• Serve as the first point of escalation for a portion of the product surface area

You Have

• BS or MS degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.


• 5+ years of real-world professional experience writing back end or data-driven software in demanding environments.


• 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 either of our Altana New York or San Francisco, CA hub locations, with hybrid work flexibility. 

Why it’s great to work at Altana

• We love to collaborate, and we win as a team!


• We are committed to engineering excellence


• We value personal and professional development


• We learn from diverse backgrounds and perspectives


• We impact the world, from enabling developing countries to identifying drug traffickers

At Altana, we believe that a diverse workforce enables greater creativity, performance, and adaptability. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome you to join us as you are. Our employment opportunities and decisions are based on business needs and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, family care or medical leave status, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by the laws or regulations in the areas in which we operate. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type, in any situation.

Offers related to employment at Altana will come from an Altana.ai email address. We will never ask for payment as part of the interview or onboarding process.