---
title: 'Forward Deployed Engineer at Altara'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-altara-san-francisco-3wakb3c3jxca'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Forward Deployed Engineer at Altara

- **Company:** Altara
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-05
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/altara/am9icG9zdDrxzkFRhhDT-cwvjk2PFyir

## Job description

We’re building the scientific intelligence platform for the physical world, to accelerate breakthroughs in semiconductors, batteries, advanced materials, aerospace, and beyond. These industries represent trillions in spend, but are still trapped in outdated software. We’re changing that by building the intelligence layer to help scientists and engineers move faster and solve core problems -- R&D through manufacturing.

We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a category-defining company at the intersection of AI and the physical sciences. And we’re building a world-class team to do it.

We recently raised a seed round led by Greylock, with participation from Neo, BoxGroup, Liquid 2, and top angels including Jeff Dean + leadership at OpenAI and AMD. Our team (ex-Applied Intuition, Glean, SpaceX, Warp, Jane Street, Verkada) works in-person in San Francisco. Our office is located walking distance from 4th and King Caltrain station.

The Role: Altara’s product can create significant value, but adoption requires someone to sit with scientists, understand how they work, earn their trust, identify the right workflow, and guide them toward a measurable outcome. We’re looking for someone that combines the technical skills to troubleshoot issues and build lightweight solutions for customers with the social stamina and patience to teach them how to use a brand new technology.

What you’ll do:

- Learn how scientists currently work, including their tools, data, language, and constraints.
- Identify high-value workflows where Altara can make an immediate difference.
- Drive pilots toward measurable outcomes, such as improving yield or shortening an R&D process, creating clear customer wins and accelerating deal cycles.
- Configure the product, troubleshoot issues, and build lightweight solutions around and with our customers.
- Teach users how to incorporate Altara into their daily work and create new champions and power users.
- Bring recurring customer insights back to engineering and turn them into reusable product capabilities, helping shape our product and engineering roadmap.

We would love to meet you if you have:

- Enough technical depth to understand data, troubleshoot integrations, configure the product, and prototype simple solutions
- Scientific fluency from engineering, physics, robotics, manufacturing, semiconductors, physics, chemistry, materials science, or a related field
- High social stamina and genuine energy from spending days with customers
- The patience to teach people who are unfamiliar with AI
- Strong discovery skills and the confidence to keep asking questions when others stop
- Product judgment to separate a one-off customer request from something Altara should build for everyone
- Comfort traveling, operating independently, and working through ambiguity

Bonus points if you have:

- Worked at an early stage startup, founded a company, or plan to start one someday.
- Experience working with a large variety of customers across industries and teaching them how to use new technology
- Experience or deep curiosity in science - you can talk shop with our customers about the problems they face

Learn More about Altara

- [Video](https://x.com/catherinehyeo/status/2051683285450019073?s=20)
- [Blog post](https://www.altara.co/blog/introducing-altara)
- [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/05/altara-secures-7m-to-bridge-the-data-gap-thats-slowing-down-physical-sciences/)
- Follow us onhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/altara-technologies/[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/altara-technologies/) andhttps://x.com/altaratech[X](https://x.com/altaratech)

## About Altara

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Altara builds a scientific intelligence platform that uses AI agents to help physical science companies (semiconductors, batteries, advanced materials) accelerate R&D and manufacturing by reasoning across fragmented, multimodal technical data.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2025
- **Founders**: Catherine Yeo (Co-Founder) and Eva Tuecke (Co-Founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: Deep Tech / Scientific Intelligence / AI for Physical Sciences (semiconductors, batteries, advanced materials, specialty chemicals)
- **Target customers**: B2B – R&D and manufacturing teams at frontier industrial companies
- **Mission/purpose**: To unlock the value of scientific and industrial data, enabling faster discovery and failure resolution in the physical sciences.

## Products & Services
- **Altara Platform**: An AI-powered intelligence layer that integrates with existing legacy systems and data sources (sensor logs, inspection images, experimental records, wafer maps, etc.). Its AI agents can reason across complex multimodal data to diagnose failures, design experiments, and accelerate workflows that previously took weeks down to minutes. Type: SaaS / AI platform.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding – $7 million (Seed round, announced May 2026)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Greylock (lead), Neo, BoxGroup, Liquid 2 Ventures, and angels including Jeff Dean (Google) and leadership at OpenAI and AMD. Partner at Greylock: Corinne Riley.
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Headcount grew ~20% month-over-month (9 employees as of mid-2026).
  - Website traffic grew 137% month-over-month (10,833 monthly visits).
  - Record-high usage from early customers shortly after launch.
  - Named to an industry list (mentioned in LinkedIn post: “Named to the…” – specific list not provided).
  - Customers already trusting Altara with critical workflows (per Greylock).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Domain expertise**: Founders combine AI research (Yeo: Warp, IBM, MIT, Harvard) with deep physics/engineering experience (Tuecke: Fermilab particle physics, SpaceX Starlink).
- **Data-first approach**: Rather than replacing legacy systems, Altara plugs into existing data silos – a less capital-intensive and more adoption-friendly strategy.
- **Multimodal reasoning**: AI agents are purpose-built for the complex, domain-specific data of physical sciences (time series, images, logs, historical reports), which general-purpose AI cannot handle.
- **Speed of execution**: Launched from stealth in May 2026 with a $7M seed round and already has active customers and job openings.

## Strategic Focus
- Current priorities: Expand AI agent capabilities for experimental design and failure analysis; deepen integrations with semiconductor, battery, and advanced materials companies; grow the engineering and GTM team to scale customer adoption.
- Long-term vision: Become the standard intelligence layer for physical science R&D and manufacturing, analogous to observability/SRE tools in software.

## Why Work Here
- **Early-stage impact**: Only ~9 employees – new hires will shape the product, culture, and direction from the ground up.
- **Hard technical challenges**: Work on one of the “hardest and most consequential problems in technology” (Greylock) – bridging AI with real-world lab and fab data.
- **Founding team**: Backed by top-tier VC (Greylock) and led by two Harvard CS grads with rare combined expertise in AI and physical sciences.
- **Open roles** (as of mid-2026): Founding GTM, Research Engineer, Chief of Staff, Design Engineer, Software Engineer – posted on LinkedIn and likely on jobs.gem.com.
- **Culture**: Described as high-speed, ambitious, and focused on real-world breakthroughs. Likely in-person in San Francisco (no explicit remote/hybrid policy stated).
- **Perks**: Not detailed, but typical for a well-funded seed startup (equity, meaningful ownership, direct access to founders).

## Sources
1. [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/altara-technologies) – Company page, employee data, open positions
2. [techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/05/altara-secures-7m-to-bridge-the-data-gap-thats-slowing-down-physical-sciences/) – Funding announcement, product description, use case
3. [greylock.com](https://greylock.com/portfolio/altara/) – Portfolio page, investor details
4. [greylock.com/blog](https://greylock.com/blog/introducing-altara-ai-for-the-physical-sciences/) – Blog post introducing Altara, founder backgrounds, vision
5. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/altara-1) – Company profile, culture overview

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