Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead

Merge Labs•San Francisco, CA

1d•$225,000 - $305,000

About The Position

Merge Labs is a frontier research lab with the mission of bridging biological and artificial intelligence to maximize human ability, agency and experience. We’re pursuing this goal by developing fundamentally new approaches to brain-computer interfaces that interact with the brain at high bandwidth, integrate with advanced AI, and are ultimately safe and accessible for anyone to use. Our software engineers build the tools and systems that let scientists and engineers turn experimental ideas into reliable measurements and useful results. We work across custom instruments, applications, scientific data and computing infrastructure. We build close to our users, test ideas quickly and make the software dependable as experiments become repeatable workflows. We are looking for a senior, hands-on software engineer with broad technical experience and the judgment to help a small team solve difficult problems. You will personally design, implement, debug and ship critical software, while helping colleagues make good architecture and delivery decisions. You will work across the stack as the problem demands: an experiment application, an SDK integration, a data interface, a performance issue or the tooling that helps everyone ship. Experience in scientific software, hardware, or instrumentation is especially useful, and we welcome strong engineers from other backgrounds who can learn quickly and work closely with domain experts. The role is an individual contributor position. There may be an opportunity to take on broader software leadership, including people management, over time. The immediate opportunity is to build consequential software and lead through technical work. This role will report directly to leadership.

Requirements

A record of personally delivering substantial software systems and supporting them after release.
Strong coding and debugging skills, sound software fundamentals and comfort learning unfamiliar parts of a stack.
Experience making architecture decisions across multiple components, with an ability to explain what you simplified and why.
Good judgment about reliability, data integrity, performance and operational failure modes.
Evidence of helping other engineers deliver through thoughtful review, mentoring and collaboration.
An appetite for hands-on work in a small team where priorities evolve with new experimental evidence.

Nice To Haves

Scientific software, robotics, instrumentation, imaging, lab automation or other software connected to physical systems.
Python, C++, Rust, Matlab, scientific data pipelines, high-throughput systems or desktop applications.
Previous people management or interest in growing into it.

Responsibilities

Personally own important software from initial problem definition through implementation, deployment and continued operation.
Turn ambiguous experimental needs into achievable software milestones with clear acceptance criteria.
Build and improve interfaces between applications, instrument SDKs, data systems and supporting infrastructure.
Pair with SDK and application engineers on difficult integration, concurrency, performance and recovery problems.
Make pragmatic decisions about reuse, languages, architecture and build-versus-buy tradeoffs.
Establish focused testing, observability and release practices that improve reliability and research velocity.
Build reliable workflows for recording high-volume experimental data to disk, managing its storage and metadata, and moving it through analysis.
Review code, mentor peers and communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to scientists and engineers.
Work with the team’s manager to prioritize work and keep commitments consistent with capacity.