Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

Responsibilities

• Design and build distributed software systems coordinating state, timing, and behavior across manufacturing hardware.
• Write, test, and debug sensors, actuators, and process controllers under real-time and reliability constraints.
• Design workflows bridging manual and automated process steps, including handoffs between production and process development.
• Evolve the existing system, including APIs governing machine behavior across the fleet, as the architecture converges.
• Instrument systems so machine and process data is structured for downstream AI/ML consumption.
• Investigate and resolve issues spanning software, firmware, and physical systems.
• Establish and model software engineering practices including testing, code review, CI/CD, and documentation.
• Improve system reliability through observability, fault handling, and graceful degradation.
• Collaborate with mechanical, electrical, and process engineers to translate physical constraints into resilient software behavior.
• Help engineering leadership converge competing architectural visions into a well-reasoned direction.

Requirements

• 5+ years building or debugging systems with real external dependencies, such as hardware, embedded devices, or networked services.
• Experience making and defending architecture decisions involving build-versus-buy, deployment topology, and service boundaries.
• Strong Python skills for production systems.
• Proficiency in at least one systems or strongly typed language: C++, Rust, or Go.
• Strong grounding in distributed-systems fundamentals, including state coordination, consistency, failure modes, and concurrency.
• Experience introducing or maintaining CI/CD, automated testing, or observability tooling in an existing codebase.
• Comfort operating against an incomplete or contested specification and driving clarity.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with real-time or resource-constrained environments, IoT, edge computing, industrial systems, robotics, warehouses, manufacturing lines, fabrication, or automation facilities.
• Experience designing observability and instrumenting systems for ML/AI pipelines.
• Experience introducing testing or CI discipline to a team that lacked it.
• Experience evaluating cloud versus on-premises or edge deployment tradeoffs for latency- or safety-sensitive systems.
• Experience debugging issues across application logic, transport, firmware, and hardware.
• Experience translating physical constraints such as latency, noise, mechanical tolerance, and safety margins into software behavior.

Compensation and Benefits

• Salary range: $180,000–$230,000 USD.
• Compensation also includes equity and benefits.