Senior Software Engineer, Instrumentation

Exthymic • San Diego, CA

2d

About The Position

Exthymic is an early-stage deep-tech startup on a mission to prevent millions of cancer deaths by making curative cell therapies widely accessible. Our platform enables the manufacturing of patient-specific treatments at the point of care. Led by experienced industry pioneers, we blend hardware, software, and biochemical engineering to disrupt the status quo and democratize life-saving therapies. Join us to solve complex challenges and drive global healthcare innovation.

Requirements

• Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related field, or equivalent industry experience.
• Typically 7+ years developing software for instruments, medical devices, robotics, autonomous vehicles, or laboratory automation, including time under a regulated software development lifecycle.
• Strong modern C++, rust, and/or Python, spanning microcontroller firmware to host applications.
• Experience with closed-loop control of physical hardware, heirarchical state-machine and behavior tree execution architectures, digital twin or in silico modeling of physical behaviors, and robotics middleware (e.g., ROS 2).
• A safety-critical engineering mindset: fault handling, safe-state design, and traceability.
• Comfort working with engineers in other disciplines at the hardware/software interface.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with regulatory submissions or design history files.
• Implementation of 21 CFR Part 11 / GMP data-integrity controls.
• Real-time image processing or in-loop ML inference.
• Simulation of fluidics instrumentation (e.g. sensors, valves, pumps)
• Microcontroller firmware development, including bringing up new hardware at the bench.
• Background in cell therapy, bioprocessing, or life-science instrumentation.
• Experience in deploying AI agents across engineering workflows, including designing guardrails for safe agent operation.
• Early-stage startup experience.

Responsibilities

• Shape the instrument software architecture - Contribute to the design of the software stack for the instrument, from firmware through instrument control, data, and the operator interface.
• Develop the instrument control software - Build the software that runs an autonomous cell-therapy manufacturing process: recipe execution, state-machine control, and the safety behavior. Design for a process that will keep changing as the science matures.
• Integrate with hardware - Write the host-side software that communicates with the instrument's microcontrollers, bringing its sensors, actuators, and imaging into the control system. Work at the bench with the engineers who designed the hardware, and contribute to firmware where it helps.
• Manage the instrument's data - Build the pipelines that capture, store, and serve process data so that every run is traceable from raw acquisition to final record.
• Enable testing across development - Support engineers and scientists in exercising their subsystems and processes on the instrument: instrumented experiments, simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and application testing as the process comes together.
• Establish robust SDLC and testing practices - Design, build, and maintain software test harnesses, automated CI/CD pipelines, code review workflows, and release management processes to ensure high code quality and reliable deployments.
• Develop within the regulatory requirements - Work under a regulated software lifecycle and help author the documentation, risk analysis, and audit trails that go with it.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and benefits package, including Medical, Dental, Vision, and 401k match.
• Medical, vision, and dental coverage
• Retirement savings plans
• Accident and term life offerings

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree