Senior Platform Instrument Control Engineer

Slope; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Merge Labs seeks a Senior Software Engineer for Platform Instrument Control to turn custom instruments into robust, Python-accessible APIs. You will build the foundation for high-throughput measurements and enable other engineers and scientists to implement protocols atop this platform.

The role focuses on real-time device control, safe orchestration, and scalable data capture, with mentorship across software practices and SDLC.

Qualifications

• Experience with real-time device control, concurrency, memory and performance.
• Experience building hardware or instrument integrations on a team.
• Experience shipping software from zero to one.
• Excellent API/SDK design taste with clean abstractions and async/large data handling.
• Empathy for non-technical users mapping architecture to user workflows.
• Bonus: experience with scientific instrumentation (ultrasound, microscopy) or lab automation or high-throughput data acquisition.

Responsibilities

• Wrap heterogeneous instruments into reusable building blocks behind a device abstraction.
• Design and build the orchestration layer shared across platforms with standardized trigger management and coordination.
• Build in safety by default (bounds, interlocks, dry-run) and reproducibility.
• Handle large-scale acquisition with streaming and backpressure-management to avoid data loss mid-experiment.
• Onboard and enable platform engineers to build scientist-facing protocols and advise on hardware needs.
• Mentor scientists and engineers on software best-practices and the SDLC.

Job description

Merge Labs seeks a Senior Software Engineer for Platform Instrument Control to turn custom instruments into robust, Python-accessible APIs. You will build the foundation for high-throughput measurements and enable other engineers and scientists to implement protocols atop this platform.

The role focuses on real-time device control, safe orchestration, and scalable data capture, with mentorship across software practices and SDLC.