Senior Software Engineer - Generalist

Orbit Neuro Co.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Orbit Neuro Co. is building a wearable brain-computer interface and related software to decode emotion, working across neural sensors, embedded systems, scientific software, and AI.

The role focuses on delivering complete features that unify the product across application, device, and cloud boundaries, with ownership of project areas and collaboration with specialists. Prototyping and agentic tooling help shape product capability and developer experience.

Qualifications

• At least five years of professional software experience.
• Experience shipping substantial software with depth in at least one area (systems, desktop apps, backend, or data infrastructure).
• Experience designing APIs and reasoning about data/state across distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Deliver complete features spanning components such as recording configuration and session metadata.
• Collaborate with embedded, desktop, and cloud engineers to design interfaces and workflows.
• Build shared libraries, simulators, replay tools, and development utilities.
• Solve system-wide design challenges in state, data flow, performance, and reliability.
• Turn ideas into tractable implementation steps using prototypes and feedback.
• Improve development and release workflows, contributing to product functionality.

Skills

C++

Python

APIs design

Distributed systems

Testing

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/EE

Tools

Docker

CMake

GitHub Actions

Job description

About Orbit

We're a team of engineers, neuroscientists, and designers working to deepen our understanding of the human brain. We're building a wearable brain-computer interface and models that decode emotion, with the goal of putting human experience and wellbeing at the center of technology. Our work spans neural sensors, embedded systems, scientific software, and AI.

We're venture funded, with backing from founders and executives across AI, neurotechnology, consumer hardware, and pharmaceuticals, including Google, Hugging Face, Apple, Stability, Microsoft, and Dropbox.

About the role

Build the features that bring the whole product together. You'll take meaningful ideas through design and implementation, working across application, device, and cloud boundaries to create a coherent experience.

This role combines depth in part of the stack with curiosity about the rest. You'll have a clear area of ownership for each project, collaborate with specialists, and work with modern C++, Python, and agentic development tools. There's room to shape both product capabilities and the tools that help a small team build them well.

You will

• Deliver complete features spanning components, such as recording configuration, session metadata, and end-to-end recording integrity.

• Collaborate with embedded, desktop, and cloud engineers to design clear interfaces and cohesive workflows.

• Build shared libraries, simulators, replay tools, and development utilities that make the product easier to build and test.

• Solve system-wide design challenges in state, data flow, performance, and reliability.

• Turn open-ended ideas into tractable implementation steps, using prototypes and feedback to explore the design.

• Improve development and release workflows, including thoughtful use of agentic tooling, while contributing directly to product functionality.

You are

• An engineer with a degree in computer science, electrical engineering, computer engineering, or a related field, and at least five years of relevant professional experience.

• Experienced shipping substantial software, with depth in at least one area such as systems, desktop applications, backend services, or data infrastructure.

• Comfortable working across component boundaries and learning an unfamiliar codebase or technology.

• Experienced designing APIs, reasoning about data and state across distributed systems, and writing tests that exercise meaningful behavior.

• Able to break an ambiguous problem into manageable pieces and explain the tradeoffs behind your approach.

• Motivated by understanding how a whole product works, with the judgment to seek specialist input when it matters.

• Someone who enjoys moving between focused implementation and collaborative design.

You might also

• Have experience with modern C++, Python, Qt/QML, embedded Linux, or cloud services, or bring complementary systems and application experience with Rust, Go, or TypeScript.

• Have connected services through gRPC, Protocol Buffers (Protobuf), REST APIs, WebSockets, or messaging systems such as MQTT, DDS, or ZeroMQ.

• Have worked on products combining physical hardware and software.

• Know scientific computing or data-intensive applications, including NumPy, SciPy, pandas, HDF5, Zarr, or relational databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL.

• Have built integration tests, hardware simulators, or developer tooling with pytest, GoogleTest, Catch2, CMake, or Docker.

• Have explored AI-assisted development and agentic workflows, or built continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins.

• Have connected products to cloud services on AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, or helped a small team bring a new product to users.

We're looking for a strong foundation and the ability to grow. You don't need experience with every technology we use, and the "You might also" section is entirely optional. If the core work feels like a good match but some details are new to you, we'd like to hear from you. Prior neuroscience or brain-computer interface experience isn't expected.

How we work

We're a small, high-performance team with quick feedback loops and room to experiment. You'll work directly with people across engineering, neuroscience, and design, understand why your work matters, and have real influence over how we build.

We work with modern software and hardware stacks, including C++23, modern Python, and a Linux-forward development environment. We use principled engineering and thoughtful design to explore, build and test, aided by modern agentic workflows. You'll have room to shape both the product and the way we create it.