Senior Software Engineer, Vault

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.

The Role

We're building Alt Vault into a standalone 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.