Staff Engineer, Software (Deployment)

PacBio•Menlo Park, CA

1d•$170,400 - $255,600•Onsite

About The Position

PacBio’s sequencing instruments are critical to sequencing labs around the world. As a Staff Deployment Engineer, you will work cross-functionally to design, develop, and deploy the compute platforms integrated into our sequencing appliances, our customers’ data centers, and the cloud. You will be expected to set technical direction rather than receive it: to decide what our deployment and platform architectures should look like several years out, build the pieces that do not exist yet, and deliver a product that satisfies CLIA labs and other regulated customers.

Requirements

10+ years of professional experience in systems, platform, release, or deployment engineering, or a Master’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related discipline plus 8+ years of such experience.
Demonstrated experience delivering Linux-based systems on appliance, instrument, or other purpose-built hardware into customer or field environments.
Fluency in Python and shell, sufficient to build and maintain production automation that others depend on.
Deep, hands-on Linux systems expertise: boot chain, systemd, filesystems and partitioning, packaging, and kernel or driver integration.
Experience designing and operating automated, reproducible image build pipelines, with a clear point of view on what makes a build trustworthy.
Experience delivering software under formal change control in a regulated or otherwise high-consequence setting, where releases must be auditable and any prior version reproducible on demand.
Strong hands-on ownership of CI/CD systems at scale, including pipeline-as-code, containerized builds, build agent fleet management, and infrastructure as code.
Production experience deploying cloud services for customer use with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
A track record of setting technical direction for a platform and driving it to completion across multiple teams, including the parts that require persuasion rather than authority.
Excellent interpersonal, written, and verbal communication skills.

Nice To Haves

Supply-chain security experience: code and artifact signing, UEFI Secure Boot, dm-verity or equivalent integrity measures, SBOM generation, and software composition analysis tooling.
Familiarity with hardening baselines and audit tooling such as CIS Benchmarks, STIG, SCAP, or SELinux policy work.
Experience with modern image build tooling such as mkosi, Packer, Yocto, or Buildroot, and with immutable or A/B-updated operating systems.
Configuration management and infrastructure-as-code experience with tools such as Ansible, Terraform, or Salt.
Experience owning on-premises development infrastructure systems such as Bitbucket, Jenkins, and Artifactory as an end-to-end administrator and architect, not only as a consumer.
Experience building or operating an observability stack (for example Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Alertmanager).
Experience managing secure remote access management systems (for example Tailscale or SecureLink).
Experience with on-premises virtualization at scale, such as Proxmox VE or VMware vSphere.
Experience mentoring senior engineers or acting as a technical lead without direct reports.

Responsibilities

Cloud deployment. Bring core data analysis pipelines to the cloud to offer flexible, on-demand compute capacity for our customers. Provide a secure, reliable, and transparent alternative to on-prem compute. Define and implement the deployment model for cloud-hosted services, including infrastructure as code, environment promotion, secrets management, and delivery pipelines, and establish the patterns other teams will adopt.
Build and release pipelines. Consolidate build infrastructure onto a single CI/CD platform, moving builds into containers so they are reproducible and independent of hand-maintained agents. Rationalize dependency management, proselytize statelessness and immutability, and instrument deployment pipelines for predictability and uptime. Develop and implement traceability and retention policies for product lifecycle management.
Image architecture and hardware integration. Own image architecture jointly with instrument engineering: composition, maintainability, and performance across node roles and hardware variants. You will build the images themselves with curated package sets, PacBio software, purposeful partition layouts, and the driver, device, and firmware integration each variant requires. This includes virtual machines in production and virtualized server equivalents used for development and test. Support custom hardware interfaces, robotics packages, and low-latency user interfaces.
Infrastructure and Configuration as code. Replace bespoke scripting and image-baked state with declarative, reviewable configuration for instruments, build infrastructure, and laboratory systems.
Supply-chain integrity and security posture. Establish the assurance capability the product needs: artifact and image signing, verified boot, automated software bill of materials generation, continuous vulnerability ingestion and triage against a defined patch cadence, and a documented hardening baseline.
Cross-functional and regulatory execution. Partner with Quality, Regulatory, Manufacturing, IT, and Field Service to make deployment auditable and predictable: traceability from commit to shipped artifact, change control and release documentation, and validated builds delivered to manufacturing on schedule.
Technical leadership and resilience. Set engineering standards, review designs and code, and mentor engineers across the organization. Document and de-risk the systems that currently rely on individual knowledge.