Senior Software Engineer, Platform SDK / 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 a frontier research lab with the mission of bridging biological and artificial intelligence to maximize human ability, agency and experience. We’re pursuing this goal by developingfundamentally new approaches to brain-computer interfaces that interact with the brain at high bandwidth, integrate with advanced AI, and are ultimately safe and accessible for anyone to use.

About the team

Merge's Core Software team builds the software backbone that will make next-generation neuroscience possible. We design, implement, and maintain the infrastructure that moves experimental data from instrument to insight—reliably, reproducibly, and at scale. Our users are biologists, clinicians, neuroscientists, and ML researchers. Our mandate is simple: build safe and correct systems that let science move faster. We are bar-raisers and scientific partners, trusted to demonstrate the highest levels of software integrity, define the interfaces for both data collection and analysis, and democratize access to scientific data and computational infrastructure across the company.

About the role

As our Senior Software Engineer for Platform Instrument Control, you'll own the software that turns Merge's custom-built instruments into something other engineers—and ultimately scientists—can build robust protocols on top of by providing them with clean, coherent APIs. Our experimental platforms are all highly custom, and the first (screening) platform you would be helping democratize access to acquires simultaneous ultrasound and microscopy readouts, requires nanosecond-scale TTL-based control, provides real-time feedback to custom environment controllers, a custom stage, and custom consumables. If it sounds exciting to build interfaces that are so clean that scientists are excited to directly write their protocols in Python, come join a team of exceptional platform engineers and help us build the foundation on top of which all high-throughput measurements at Merge will be taken!

In this role, you will:

• Wrap heterogeneous instruments—Ultrasound-on-chip, cameras, stages, temperature control, delay generators, etc.—as reusable, well-tested building blocks behind a coherent device abstraction.

• Design and build the orchestration layer that is shared across our different experimental platforms—standardize the language we use for trigger management, checkpoint coordination, and safely orchestrating our experiments.

• Build in safety by default (parameter bounds, interlocks, dry-run/simulation) and reproducibility, so protocols run identically every time.

• Handle large-scale acquisition gracefully—work with our data platform team to integrate streaming and backpressure-management so terabyte-per-second data collection never fails mid-experiment.

• Onboard and enable the platform engineers who will build scientist-facing protocols on your foundation, and act as a trusted advisor on the integration needs for new platform-related hardware purchases.

• Mentor other scientists and engineers on software best-practices and the SDLC.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• Love for deep systems engineering: real-time device control, concurrency, memory, and performance.

• Experience building hardware or instrument integrations on and for a team, not just for your own use.

• Relish shipping software from zero to one: whether in a startup or just for new teams.

• Excellent API/SDK design taste—you build interfaces other engineers love to build on, with clean abstractions, good defaults, and elegant handling of async and large data.

• Empathy for non-technical users—you care deeply about how your architectural decisions map to the final user experience of biologists, chemists, and other non-programmers that are building their workflows on top of our measurement platform.

• Bonus: specific experience with scientific instrumentation (ultrasound, microscopy) or lab automation (liquid handling, robotics) or high-throughput data acquisition.

For more information about hiring at Merge, please visit our Hiring FAQ

Merge Labs does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, family status, ancestry, citizenship, U.S. military (state and federal) and veteran status, or any other legally protected status. It is our intention that all applicants be given equal opportunity and that selection decisions are based on job related factors. We are an equal opportunity employer.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made by emailing [e-mail].