Altana Innovation & Technology Culture

Altana’s engineering teams combine deep trade expertise, scalable infrastructure and AI-assisted development to respond quickly to complex changes in global commerce. In this example, a small team turned months of preparation into a production tariff tool in two weeks, processing billions of rows of data while helping customers identify potential duty savings.

“When the Supreme Court struck down IEEPA tariffs on February 24, 2026, Altana was uniquely positioned to respond because we’d been building toward this moment for months.

The team had been at work building out our tariff stacking calculator that correctly models the interactions between six or more overlapping tariff programs. The core challenge is what we call the ‘30 percent problem’ — the complex stacking logic where naively summing rates produces wildly inaccurate results. To give a concrete example: A shipment from Israel to the United States carries an actual duty of 28.2 percent, but if you simply add up the applicable rates, you get 143.2 percent. Getting that math right across every product, every origin and every combination of programs is a genuinely hard engineering problem. Within two weeks of the IEEPA ruling, a team of three engineers shipped a minimum viable product. That timeline would have been unthinkable even a year ago.

This wasn’t a team of 10 working around the clock. It was two to three engineers who deeply understood the domain, using agentic coding to compress weeks of boilerplate, data transformation logic and test scaffolding into days. The system they shipped ingests 100,000 raw customs entries and recalculates duties against billions of rows of tariff data. Agentic tooling handled the mechanical work so the code also got better while the product shipped faster. By early March, customers were already using the tool. Across the platform, the team had identified millions in average duty savings and calculated over one million complex product duties.

What I’m most proud of isn’t just the single feature itself. I am most proud of the system that made this possible: engineers who’d been embedded in the tariff problem for months, infrastructure that was ready when the moment came, and agentic tooling that let a tiny team ship a production system in two weeks that processes billions of rows of tariff data and puts real money back in customers’ pockets. That’s not a demo. That’s the compounding payoff of customer proximity, deliberate infrastructure investment and AI-native engineering working together.”

Altana builds innovation into everyday work by encouraging employees to experiment with AI, learn continuously and collaborate across teams to turn new ideas into practical solutions. Employees balance today’s global trade realities with ambitious thinking about what could work differently, giving them opportunities to help design technology and processes that can reshape how global trade operates.

“Altana sets me and my team up to constantly innovate by expecting us to constantly innovate. Whether it is a mandate to infuse AI into as many processes as possible to work smarter, all-company educational sessions on evolutions in trade compliance, or cross-functional whiteboarding sessions to make new ideas a reality, we are innovating every day.

One of my favorite feelings I encounter regularly working as a product line manager at Altana is balancing the reality of the present and the vision of what’s possible. I straddle two imperatives, speaking extensively to users and SMEs about existing processes in global trade to ensure our products work with the structures and operations in place today. At the same time, I have to think ambitiously, knowing that the solutions we have implemented at Altana are already changing paradigms and transforming how trade can work. Working at Altana is discovering, designing and breaking ground in this green space between how things are done and how things could be — all guided by the mission to fix globalization.”