Senior Software Engineer, Platform SDK / Instrument Control

Merge; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); On-site; USD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Merge Labs seeks a Senior Software Engineer for Platform Instrument Control in San Francisco. You will turn custom instruments into robust APIs and build a safe, scalable orchestration layer to support high-throughput experiments.

You will mentor engineers, design reusable building blocks, and ensure reproducible protocols with strong focus on real-time control, concurrency, and excellent API design. Join a team advancing neuroscience with software.

Qualifications

• Experience in real-time device control and high-throughput data systems.
• Proven track record with instrument integrations.
• Strong API design and async data handling.

Responsibilities

• Wrap heterogeneous instruments as reusable building blocks.
• Design and build the orchestration layer for experiments.
• Build in safety and reproducibility for protocol runs.
• Handle large-scale acquisition with streaming and backpressure management.
• Onboard and enable platform engineers; mentor teammates.
• Mentor scientists and engineers on software SDLC.

Skills

Real-time systems

Python APIs

Hardware integrations

Concurrency & performance

API/SDK design

Mentoring

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 developing fundamentally 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.

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].