Senior Platform SDK Engineer - Instrument Control

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

Job summary

Merge Labs is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for Platform Instrument Control to turn our custom instruments into robust, Python-friendly interfaces. You will own the software that enables researchers to write protocols on top of a reliable device abstraction, handling ultrasound, microscopy, and other platforms.

You’ll design the orchestration layer, enforce safety and reproducibility, and scale data acquisition while mentoring the team on software best-practices and SDLC.

Qualifications

• Experience in real-time device control, concurrency, memory, and performance.
• Experience building hardware or instrument integrations for a team.
• API/SDK design with clean abstractions and async/large data handling.

Responsibilities

• Wrap heterogeneous instruments as reusable building blocks behind a coherent device abstraction.
• Design and build the orchestration layer shared across experimental platforms.
• Build safety by default (bounds, interlocks, dry-run) and reproducibility across protocols.
• Handle large-scale acquisition with streaming and backpressure management to prevent failures.
• Onboard and enable platform engineers and advise on hardware integration needs.
• Mentor scientists and engineers on software best-practices and SDLC.

Job description

Merge Labs is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for Platform Instrument Control to turn our custom instruments into robust, Python-friendly interfaces. You will own the software that enables researchers to write protocols on top of a reliable device abstraction, handling ultrasound, microscopy, and other platforms.

You’ll design the orchestration layer, enforce safety and reproducibility, and scale data acquisition while mentoring the team on software best-practices and SDLC.