Staff Software Engineer

Onto Innovation•Upton, MA

10d•$115,200 - $172,800

About The Position

Onto Innovation is a leader in process control, combining global scale with an expanded portfolio of leading-edge technologies that include: 3D metrology spanning the chip from nanometer-scale transistors to micron-level die-interconnects; macro defect inspection of wafers and packages; metal interconnect composition; factory analytics; and lithography for advanced semiconductor packaging. Our breadth of offerings across the entire semiconductor value chain helps our customers solve their most difficult yield, device performance, quality, and reliability issues. Onto Innovation strives to optimize customers’ critical path of progress by making them smarter, faster and more efficient. Job Summary: The Staff Software Engineer will play a key role in architecting and developing software that enables reliable wafer handling, robotics coordination, safety interlocks, motion control, system orchestration, and factory automation interfaces for a standardized EFEM (Equipment Front End Module) platform. This role involves designing and implementing reusable software components, integrating hardware subsystems, and contributing to a scalable architecture adopted across Onto products. The ideal candidate has strong experience in structured real-time software design, complex electromechanical systems, HW/SW integration.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
Proven experience (10+ years for Staff level) in software development for highly technical applications, including leading architecture/design of large-scale, mission-critical software systems
Experience driving technical roadmaps, resolving cross-team dependencies, and making tradeoffs across performance, maintainability, and schedule.
Strong knowledge of hardware-software integration and experience working with complex systems.
Deep expertise in .NET including runtime behavior, performance, threading, and memory management.
Strong C# proficiency using modern features
Experience structuring systems using clean architectural patterns, dependency injection, modularity, and API versioning.
Mastery of concurrency design: multithreading, synchronization, message passing, actor models, and preventing deadlocks/race conditions.
Experience designing/maintaining APIs and integration points: Internal IPC (gRPC, message bus, shared memory, etc.), External interfaces (factory host integration, equipment automation)
Demonstrated experience debugging complex multi-threaded environments.
Ability to travel both domestically (~10%) and internationally (infrequent and only when needed)

Nice To Haves

Experience in the semiconductor industry, robotics, or similar sector
Experience with SEMI standards such as E84, E87, E90, E30, E37

Responsibilities

Act as lead software engineer on new projects, determining requirements and a robust design, and collaborating with hardware engineers to ensure seamless hardware-software integration
Develop software modules for wafer-handling robotics, load ports, sensors, pre-aligners, and system-level orchestration
Design of extensible APIs, control interfaces, and internal communication frameworks
Optimize software performance and ensure scalability
Provide mentoring and guidance to more junior team members
Develop automated tests, simulation tools, and validation frameworks for EFEM software
Perform system‑level troubleshooting, data analysis, and optimization of EFEM software performance
Identify and drive process, architecture, and code quality improvements across the EFEM software stack and across multiple teams/modules