Senior Software Engineer, Vault

The Role

We're building Alt Vault into a standalone $100M+ business, and you are its founding engineer. That means automating intake, scan orchestration, and quality control so items go live fast. It means extending the whole system beyond trading cards. And it means shipping Vault-as-a-Service — the account infrastructure, billing, and APIs that let enterprise partners programmatically vault, ship, and manage assets at scale.

The metric: time from item received to live on platform. Drive it down, and keep driving it down as the asset classes multiply.

This is software that touches the physical world, which means it fails in physical ways.. If you like operational complexity, if you think in P&Ls and SLAs rather than just tickets, and if the phrase "nobody has built this yet" reads as an opportunity rather than a risk, this is the seat.

What You'll Own:

• The vault pipeline, automated. Drastically reduce the time from item received to live on platform: intake automation, scan orchestration, and the quality-control tooling that catches a mis-scan before a customer does. If an item is mis-recorded, that isn't a data problem. That's someone's asset and someone's trust.

• Vault-as-a-Service. Architect the account infrastructure, billing, and external APIs that let enterprise partners vault, ship, and manage assets programmatically. External partners behave unpredictably; the API has to hold anyway.

• The digitization stack. Optimize card imaging and lighting pipelines, and help turn static front-and-back photos into 360-degree views for digital repackers.

• The full stack, not half of it. Take features from technical design through polished UI. Vault touches real-world operations, and the product surfaces need to be as sharp as the backend. This is not a backend seat with a frontend disclaimer.

• The team behind you. Level up a growing Vault team through code reviews, technical documentation, and mentorship.

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:

• Use vision models for quality control on the imaging line — flag a misaligned scan, a glare artifact, a label that doesn't match the manifest — so the exception surfaces before the item goes live rather than after a customer complains

• Build a partner-behavior simulator from an enterprise partner's own integration spec: malformed manifests, duplicate submissions, out-of-order webhooks, an SLA breach. Test the failure paths a sandbox will never give you

• Stand up an agent that triages the intake exception queue overnight, clusters what went wrong, and hands you a ranked list with a proposed cause per cluster instead of a backlog of one-offs

• Use models to bootstrap a new asset class: turn a grading authority's condition taxonomy and a pile of listing descriptions into a working schema and extraction pipeline for watches or sealed wax in days, not a quarter

• Put an MCP server over the vault inventory and event history so "where is this item and what happened to it" is a sentence, not another one-off query

• Use Claude Code or Cursor as the default way you work through a migration or a refactor, not as autocomplete

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:

• 5+ years of backend experience (Python, Postgres, AWS or similar cloud infrastructure) and frontend experience (React, React Native, JavaScript/TypeScript). Both halves are load-bearing here.

• A track record of owning features or systems from design to production. Design doc through shipped UI, not a ticket you closed.

• Business-owner thinking. You understand P&Ls, SLAs, and what it takes to run a product as an independent business unit — not just ship code inside one.

• A pull toward operational complexity. You're energized by problems that bridge software and the physical world: logistics, imaging, asset handling, partner integrations.

• Pragmatism and pace. You know when to build custom and when to integrate, and you bias toward action.

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

• A user-first mindset with a sharp eye for clean UX and performance.

Bonus: familiarity with the collectibles space or alternative asset marketplaces. Logistics, customs, or shipping systems experience. You collect.

How We'll Interview You:

We'll be specific so you can prepare. Before any of it: download the app, put a card up, make a bid, and try Snap to Sell. Every round assumes you've used the product, and we expect your point of view to sharpen as you go. For this role, also look at what we say about the vault itself — where your card physically goes, and what you'd want to know if it were yours.

1. Recruiter screen — 25 minutes, Google Meet. Come ready to talk about the metric you own today and how you're performing against it, why Alt specifically, and how you're actually using AI. We'll align on comp and answer your questions.

2. Hiring manager — 45 minutes, Google Meet. Be ready to go deep on a system you owned end to end: what you built, what alternatives you considered, what you'd do differently now, and what the impact was. Have the numbers.

3. Technical screen — 60 minutes. A hands-on working session close to what this role actually does. Think out loud.

4. System design — 60 minutes. Design an external-facing vault API and the pipeline behind it under real constraints. We'll push back on at least one of your choices on purpose — how you take that matters as much as the design.

5. Culture interview — How you work in ambiguity and with the operations people on the other side of your software.

6. Leore, our founder and CEO — 30 minutes. Everyone who joins Alt meets Leore. Come with a point of view on where you'd take Vault first.

7. Reference check(s) — 15 minutes with a former manager(s)

What You’ll Get From Us:

• A seat at the table to help shape the future of Alt and the alternative asset space

• Autonomy and ownership on projects that matter

• 100% remote working environment

• $100/month work-from-home stipend

• $200/month wellness stipend

• WeWork office stipend

• 401(k) retirement benefits

• Flexible vacation policy

• Generous paid parental leave

• Competitive healthcare benefits, including HSA, for you and your dependent(s)

Base salary range: $140,000-$180,000, plus equity. Offers may vary based on experience, location, and other factors.