---
title: 'Senior / Staff Software Engineer at Autoscience'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-software-engineer-autoscience-san-mateo-dxphvysykyf7'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Senior / Staff Software Engineer at Autoscience

- **Company:** Autoscience
- **Location:** San Mateo
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-03-11
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/autoscience/8608b950-0779-4a09-90fb-a5c8587cb69e

## Job description

Company Description At Autoscience Institute, we automate AI research. Recently, we announced the first AI agent to autonomously create peer-reviewed literature (ICLR 2025) and the first AI system to win a Kaggle medal. We are passionate about pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence and contributing to groundbreaking advancements in the field.

## Role Description

This is a full-time on-site role for a Senior or Staff Software Engineer (Technical Lead) located in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this role, you will lead the design and development of core systems that power autonomous research agents. You’ll be responsible for building reliable backend infrastructure and production systems that support large-scale AI experimentation and research workflows. We are looking for engineers who have owned complex projects end-to-end, contributed to system architecture, and helped guide small teams of engineers through delivery. You should be comfortable writing high-quality code, producing clear design documents, and making thoughtful technical decisions that shape how systems evolve over time. You will work closely with both engineers and researchers to translate experimental ideas into robust production systems.

## Responsibilities

- Lead the design and implementation of core backend and infrastructure systems
- Own projects from architecture and design through production deployment
- Write clear technical design documents and drive engineering decisions
- Build and maintain 24/7 production systems supporting autonomous research agents
- Partner closely with research teams to productionize experimental workflows
- Guide and collaborate with engineers on system design and implementation
- Improve system reliability, scalability, and observability
- Help shape the technical direction of the platform

## Qualifications

- Experience leading complex engineering projects or technical initiatives
- Experience acting as a technical lead or guiding small teams of engineers
- Strong software design and architecture skills
- Demonstrable experience writing clear technical design documents
- Strong experience with Python
- Experience building or operating backend or production infrastructure
- Experience working in 24/7 production environments
- Experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or similar cloud infrastructure
- Strong understanding of software evolution, maintainability, and system design tradeoffs
- Ability to collaborate effectively with both engineers and researchers
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field
- Strong candidates will typically have 5+ years of experience building and operating production software systems, including ownership of projects from design through deployment

## Benefits & Perks

- Our comp is competitive against major LLM frontier lab packages
- Unlimited PTO and flexible working arrangements
- Conference attendance and publication support

Our Culture We're a team of passionate researchers and engineers working to automate scientific discovery. We believe in the power of AI to accelerate scientific discovery and are committed to responsible AI development.

## About Autoscience

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Autoscience builds AI systems that autonomously conduct AI research — from generating original peer-reviewed papers to shipping verified model improvements for enterprise ML teams.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage, $14M raised)
- **Headquarters**: San Mateo, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Not publicly disclosed

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence R&D, automated machine learning
- **Target customers**: B2B (enterprise ML teams using Mira) and B2C/B2B for academia (Carl)
- **Mission**: Automate AI research and development to compress years of ML discovery into months, breaking the human bottleneck in AI innovation.

## Products & Services
- **[Carl](https://autoscience.ai)**: An AI research scientist for academia that hypothesizes, runs ablations, writes full-length papers, and submits them to peer review. First AI system to produce a peer-reviewed paper (ICLR 2025 Workshop).
- **[Mira](https://autoscience.ai)**: An AI-driven R&D system for enterprise ML. It drops into a customer’s stack, reads the codebase, runs experiments, and ships pull requests that are guaranteed to beat the baseline on the customer’s own evals.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: $14M total funding (Seed round, March 2026)
- **Notable Investors**: General Catalyst (lead), Perplexity Fund, Toyota Ventures, S32, MaC Ventures [autoscience.ai](https://www.autoscience.ai/blog/autoscience-autonomous-ai-lab)
- **Growth Signals**: 7 employees (as of mid-2026) with +42.9% monthly headcount growth [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/autoscienceai). First autonomous system to earn a Silver Medal in a Kaggle competition (Santa 2025, vs. 3,300 teams). 3 active job postings as of July 2026, indicating scaling.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover in autonomous AI research agents**: Proven capability to produce peer-reviewed, publishable research and win ML competitions without human intervention.
- **Direct code integration**: Mira doesn’t just advise — it writes and ships production-ready improvements, creating a tight feedback loop.
- **Research-grade rigor**: In-house culture of experimental design and scientific depth, not just LLM orchestration.

## Strategic Focus
- Expand the engineering and research teams (currently hiring for Software Engineer, Senior/Staff Software Engineer, and Machine Learning Research Scientist) [autoscience.ai/careers](https://www.autoscience.ai/careers).
- Deepen partnerships with select large enterprises to replace understaffed ML teams with autonomous R&D capacity.

## Why Work Here
- **In-person, collaborative culture**: Full-time in San Mateo, with an emphasis on pairing, whiteboarding, and sitting next to teammates [autoscience.ai/careers](https://www.autoscience.ai/careers).
- **Competitive compensation**: Meaningful equity, competitive cash, 401(k) plan, relocation support for Bay Area moves, and unlimited PTO [autoscience.ai/careers](https://www.autoscience.ai/careers).
- **Frontier research environment**: Work directly with the founding team on autonomous systems that ideate, experiment, and improve customer models. Published at top venues (ICLR 2025 Workshop) [autoscience.ai](https://www.autoscience.ai/blog/autoscience-autonomous-ai-lab).
- **Values-driven**: Depth over breadth, transparency, ship and iterate, research-grade rigor [autoscience.ai/careers](https://www.autoscience.ai/careers).
- **High-growth early stage**: Small team (7 employees) with rapid hiring, offering significant impact and ownership.

## Sources
1. [autoscience.ai](https://autoscience.ai/)
2. [autoscience.ai/careers](https://www.autoscience.ai/careers)
3. [linkedin.com/company/autoscienceai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/autoscienceai)
4. [autoscience.ai/blog/autoscience-autonomous-ai-lab](https://www.autoscience.ai/blog/autoscience-autonomous-ai-lab)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/autoscience](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/autoscience)

## Other roles at Autoscience

- [Project Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/project-manager-autoscience-san-mateo-2nfm6ash3pm8) — San Mateo
- [Product Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketing-manager-autoscience-san-mateo-k80q21yt80m0) — San Mateo
- [Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-autoscience-san-mateo-czz54ssknk3s) — San Mateo
- [Machine Learning Research Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-research-scientist-autoscience-san-mateo-wf3axmr9k87g) — San Mateo
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