Software Engineer - Alt

Job Description

Alt is unlocking the value of alternative assets, starting with the $5 B trading-card market. We let collectors buy, sell, vault, and finance their cards in one place and we are backed by leaders at Stripe, Coinbase, Seven Seven Six, and pro athletes like Tom Brady and Giannis Antetokounmpo. Our next frontier is real-time pricing at scale—the Alt Value that powers every trade, loan, and product on the platform.

About This Role

We're hiring software engineers across Alt's core product: auctions and marketplace experiences, payments and lending, vault operations, and growth. You'll own a meaningful part of the platform, taking problems from product definition and technical design through production and polished UI.

The challenges span software and real-world outcomes: resolving hundreds of bids in the closing seconds of an auction, getting sellers paid accurately and quickly, turning a physical collectible into a live digital asset, or finding and fixing the step where a new customer drops out.

We are looking for engineers who think like a product owner and build like an engineer. You'll help decide what to build, understand the business outcome behind it, and own whether it works.

What You'll Own

• Products and systems, end to end. Take features from an ambiguous customer problem through architecture, implementation, and launch. Own the backend logic and the customer-facing experience it supports, from seller tools and discovery to account activity and submission flows.

• The engineering behind the experience. Build reliable, performant systems for challenges such as real-time bidding, money movement, inventory workflows, and partner integrations. Design for concurrency, data consistency, and the failure paths that show up in production.

• Product outcomes. Work with product, design, and business partners to identify the right problems, make trade-offs, and measure results. Your work might improve auction GMV, seller activation, payout reliability, or the time from an item arriving at the vault to going live.

• New capabilities and better workflows. Build tools, APIs, and automation that help collectors, sellers, partners, and internal teams do more. Know when to build custom and when to integrate an existing solution.

• The quality of what you ship. Own testing, instrumentation, and performance. Use production feedback to catch problems, understand behavior, and keep improving the product after launch.

• The team around you. Raise the bar through thoughtful code reviews, technical documentation, and sharing what you learn.

How You'll Use AI Here

We don't want to hear that you use Claude every day. Everyone does. We want to know what you've built with it. Concretely, in this role:

• Build practical AI-powered product features, such as instant valuations, personalized discovery, listing enrichment, or automated quality checks. Take models from prototype to a customer or operational workflow that solves a real problem.

• Stand up agents that monitor systems, triage exceptions, and surface actionable findings. Turn telemetry, operational queues, or funnel data into a ranked set of problems with proposed causes and next steps.

• Use models to build simulators and generate adversarial test cases. Exercise traffic spikes, unpredictable partner behavior, and edge cases before customers encounter them.

• Put MCP servers over product data and event history so questions about an item, transaction, or customer journey can be investigated in plain language.

• Use Claude Code or Cursor as the default way you build, refactor, migrate, and test, not as autocomplete. Apply engineering judgment to the output and own the quality of what ships.

If you've built agents, wired up connectors, written skills or MCP servers, or shipped internal tooling your team actually depends on, lead with that. Name the artifact, not the tool.

What You Bring

• Full-stack engineering ability. Experience building and scaling applications with strong backend fundamentals in Python, Postgres, and AWS or comparable infrastructure, alongside frontend experience with React, React Native, and TypeScript.

• Experience taking on hard problems. You've turned an idea into a working product or owned a technical challenge with meaningful constraints, and can explain the decisions, depth of work, and results that made it an achievement.

• A builder's track record. You've owned features or systems from design to production. You can take an idea, work through the ambiguity, and turn it into something people use.

• Product sense. You understand the customer problem and business outcome behind your work. You help shape what gets built, explain the why behind your decisions, and care about clean UX and performance.

• An AI-native workflow. You use AI deeply and habitually to prototype, build, and iterate. You can point to concrete examples of how it has expanded what you can deliver, and you know how to evaluate and improve its output.

• Pragmatism and pace. You know when to build custom and when to integrate. You make deliberate trade-offs, bias toward action, and take responsibility for moving the work forward.

• Strong collaboration and communication. You write great docs, ask smart questions, and give thoughtful feedback.

Bonus Points for any of the Following

• Auctions and marketplace: Experience with high-concurrency bidding, real-time interfaces, personalization, or recommendation systems.

• Ledger and financial infrastructure: Experience with payment integrations, double-entry ledgers, reconciliation, or lending systems where correctness and auditability matter.

• Vault and operations: Experience with logistics, inventory or asset management, imaging workflows, or enterprise APIs connecting software to physical operations.

• Growth: Experience with experimentation, product analytics, attribution, or lifecycle infrastructure that improves acquisition and activation.

• Startup experience, particularly building new products or systems from the ground up.

• Familiarity with collectibles or alternative asset marketplaces. You collect, or you have a view on where this market is going.

What We Offer

• We cover 85% of your medical, dental, and vision, and up to 50% for dependents. HSA/FSA available

• Generous PTO that people actually take

• Parental leave at full salary

• $200/month wellness + $100/month home office stipend

• Free DoorDash Pass membership, because dinner shouldn't be a decision

• Remote-first, with WeWork access when you want a room with other humans

• 401(k)

• Alt Equity to all full-time employees

Base Salary: $300k - $500k depending on