Senior / Staff Software Engineer
Job Description
Job DescriptionSenior / Staff Software Engineer
Company: Autoscience Institute
Location: San Mateo, CA (in office 4 days per week; flexible hours)
Compensation: $300,000 - $350,000 + competitive equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: H-1B transfers, TN and O-1 sponsored
About Autoscience Institute
Autoscience Institute builds AI systems that autonomously conduct AI research. It announced the first AI agent to autonomously create peer-reviewed literature (ICLR 2025 Workshops), and its commercial product Mira is deployed at top-three global quant trading firms, delivering 20%+ model performance gains.
Founded in 2024, Autoscience has about 10 people and raised $14M from General Catalyst, Perplexity Fund, S32, MaC Ventures and Toyota Ventures, with a Series A in progress.
The Role
Autoscience is hiring Senior / Staff Software Engineers (5+ years) to join a tiny, elite team as high-leverage ICs writing production Python that powers recursive self-improvement for Mira. You have owned complex projects end to end, write pristine code and operate without hand-holding at a company where iteration speed is the competitive advantage. As one of the first senior engineering hires, you will shape technical direction.
What You Will Do
- Build and optimize the recursive self-improvement pipeline for Mira.
- Work on the agentic discovery search system and the post-training stack used for customer-specific models.
- Write high-performance Python that speeds up autonomous research workflows.
- Turn experimental ideas into production systems with researchers and engineers.
- Shape architecture and technical direction.
What You Bring
- 5+ years of software engineering experience
- Ownership of complex projects end to end
- Excellent production Python
- Backend and ML infrastructure experience (GCP a plus)
- Ability to work in the San Mateo office 4 days a week
Tech Stack
Python, Google Cloud Platform, backend infrastructure, production systems, ML infrastructure, AI observability