Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Alt is a company unlocking the value of alternative assets through a platform for buying, selling, vaulting, and financing collectibles. The Senior Software Engineer, Auctions will build and scale high-concurrency auction systems and responsive real-time user interfaces, while developing AI-powered valuation, liquidity, discovery, and seller-tooling features. The role also involves setting engineering standards for reliability, performance, and code quality.
Responsibilities
- The auction engine. Build and scale the high-concurrency bidding and listing systems that power nine-figure annual GMV. Thundering herd in the closing seconds is a design constraint, not an incident
- AI-powered liquidity. Develop the next generation of features that use AI to give consignors and sellers instant valuations and upfront liquidity. Being wrong here costs money, which is what makes it interesting
- Personalized discovery. Use data and machine learning to match unique, one-of-one collectibles to the right buyers. Every item is a cold start; that's the problem
- Power-seller tooling. Design and launch the management tools that high-frequency sellers and veteran hobbyists actually need. Watch what they do in spreadsheets today, then delete the spreadsheet
- The whole experience. Backend bid resolution through the responsive UI where the action happens. You own the schema change and the screen it ripples out to
- The bar. Mentor the team and set the standard for code quality, reliability, and performance
- Ship instant valuation into the consignor flow — take an Alt Value, a card's condition and provenance language, and recent comps, and produce an upfront liquidity offer a seller can accept in one tap. This is the flagship AI feature on this team, and it is user-facing
- Use vision and language models to enrich listings at scale: parse condition notes, extract attributes from listing photos and descriptions, and turn a messy long tail of one-of-one items into structured data a recommender can actually use
- Build a load-and-concurrency harness you can talk to — generate the closing-seconds bid storm, replay it against a branch, and get back where the write path bent, without spending two days wiring a load test
- Stand up an agent over auction telemetry that watches close windows and flags anomalies — bid latency creeping, a seller's listings underperforming their comps — before a power seller emails us about it
- Put an MCP server over listing, bid, and pricing history so "why did this lot close low" is a sentence, not another one-off query
- Use Claude Code or Cursor as the default way you work through a refactor or a migration, not as autocomplete
Skills
- 5+ years building and scaling complex applications — Python, Postgres, AWS or comparable cloud infrastructure
- Modern frontend mastery. Deep experience with React, TypeScript, and building high-performance real-time UIs. Real-time is the operative word: this is not a CRUD screen
- Reliability under pressure. A track record of building systems that stay up when the stakes and the traffic are highest. You've been paged during the worst possible ten minutes
- AI pragmatism. You've taken LLMs or computer vision models and turned them into practical, user-facing features that solved a real business problem. Not a demo
- Product instincts. You don't build what's on the ticket. You understand the collector mindset and build things that delight them — and you can explain the why behind past work before you explain the how
- High agency. You thrive where you're expected to find the highest-leverage work and go execute it without a hand-holding manual
- Experience with personalization engines, recommendation systems, or AI/ML integrations
- Startup experience
- You collect, or you have a view on where this market is going
Benefits
- Equity for all full-time employees
- For full-time Employees: 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 stipend
- $100/month home office stipend
- Free DoorDash Pass membership
- Remote-first (for most positions), with WeWork access when you want a room with other humans
- 401(k)
- Alt Equity to all full-time employees
Company Overview