Senior/Staff Software Engineer - Edge

Sage; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 175,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Health and dental insurance

Vision insurance

Holiday schedule

Remote days (2/week)

Office lunch & snacks

Job summary

Sage is a care intelligence platform for senior living and skilled nursing, building edge devices and cloud infrastructure that work together reliably at scale. You will define the architecture for Sage's edge computing platform, own hard problems like fall detection and resident location tracking, and mentor other engineers while shaping how we build, not just what we build.

Based near New York City, Sage offers in-office collaboration with up to two remote days per week, a strong benefits

Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend systems experience.
• Linux/Unix environments with debugging expertise.
• Deep knowledge in at least one language (C++, Java, Go, Python, Rust) with memory, concurrency, and performance understanding.
• Working knowledge of networking and distributed systems.
• Demonstrated curiosity through side projects or self-learning.
• Ability to lead a technical effort from ambiguous problem to a real outcome.

Responsibilities

• Shape the architecture of edge devices and cloud systems deployed in the real world.
• Investigate ambiguous problems like resident location modeling and fall detection.
• Build diagnostic tooling for hardware you cannot walk up to.
• Troubleshoot remotely when field issues occur, balancing network, hardware, and software aspects.
• Collaborate with Sage teams to ship end-to-end solutions.
• Review code and mentor other engineers to improve skills.
• Advocate for better architectural approaches even when it means deviating from the status quo.

Skills

Backend systems

Linux/Unix

Networking

Distributed systems

C++

Java

Go

Python

Rust

Edge computing

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

The first baby boomers turn 80 this year. Over the next decade, the population most likely to need daily care will grow faster than the buildings, the staff, or the systems available to serve it.

Sage is the care intelligence platform for senior living and skilled nursing. We connect the hardware senior care runs on, including nurse call, fall management, and wander management, with software caregivers actually use. That consistent use is what produces reliable data, and reliable data is what gives operators a true picture of how their communities are running.

Sage is a collaborative team of ambitious, multi-disciplinary entrepreneurs on a mission to reinvent senior care with a modern operating system for caregivers. Millions of people depend on this care getting better, and we move with the urgency that deserves.

About This Role

Somewhere in a senior living community right now, a camera and a small computer are working together to figure out whether the person who just fell is okay. The community’s network connection may be fiddly and unreliable, and the deployed hardware has its own quirks. That system is one of thousands just like it, running software your team wrote, doing work that matters if something goes wrong.

This is the job: building and evolving the systems that enable edge hardware (including cameras and other sensors), and cloud infrastructure to work together reliably, at scale, even when a connection drops or a device behaves in a way nobody planned for.

If you've spent real time in Linux, networking, or hardware because you were curious rather than because a job required it, we think you could thrive in this role. We care less about whether you've used our exact stack before and more about whether you're the kind of engineer who takes a system apart, mentally or literally, until you understand why it works.

You'll define the architecture for Sage's edge computing platform, own hard and often unsolved problems (e.g. fall detection, resident location tracking, integrating unpredictable third-party hardware), and help set the technical bar for the engineering org. You'll also mentor other engineers and be a voice in how we build, not just what we build.

What You'll Do

• Shape the architecture of a fleet of edge devices deployed in the physical world, and the cloud systems that orchestrate, monitor, and update them
• Dig into ambiguous, often novel problems (resident location modeling, fall detection, sensor fusion)
• Build the diagnostic tooling that lets us understand what's happening on hardware we can't just walk up to
• Get hands-on with remote troubleshooting when something breaks in the field, reasoning about network, hardware, and software all at once
• Work directly with other Sage teams to ship solutions end to end collaboratively
• Review code and run design discussions, and help less experienced engineers get better by through teaching and explaining
• Push back on us when there's a better way to build something; we'd rather be right than consistent

What We're Looking For

This describes the kind of engineer who tends to thrive in this role. If most of it sounds like you, we want to hear from you, even if your resume doesn't map cleanly onto "IoT engineer."

• You have professional experience working in complex backend systems: This usually means at least 7+ years of work experience, building (and sometimes breaking) within systems that grew and changed over time.
• You understand systems, not just frameworks: You're comfortable in Linux/Unix environments well past the level of running commands you looked up. You've broken things, debugged them, and come out the other side understanding what happened.
• You have real depth in at least one language (object-oriented or otherwise; Java, C++, Rust, Go, Python, and C# are all fine signals) with strong computing fundamentals and can reason about memory, concurrency, and performance at a lower level.
• You have working knowledge of networking, enough to reason about what happens when a device drops offline mid-update, or why a connection is behaving strangely, without needing to look up the fundamentals first.
• You're demonstrably curious, e.g. in side projects, open source contributions, a home lab, a technical hobby, or a history of teaching yourself things. We care less about the domain than that it exists.
• You can hold complexity and still ship. You've led a technical effort, official title or not, from a fuzzy problem to a real outcome, and you know how to make tradeoffs under ambiguity.

Re: years of experience: we're not fixated on the number. We care about depth and range. Someone with 6 years of genuinely varied, hands-on systems work will often be a stronger fit than someone with 10 years in a narrow web stack. If you're unsure whether your background counts, apply anyway and let us figure that out together.

Nice to Haves

These are bonuses, not filters:

• Strong, well-reasoned opinions about tools and technologies, including ones you'd argue against using
• Experience with RF communication or hands-on hardware/embedded work
• Experience designing across edge and cloud environments, including OTA updates and fleet management
• Familiarity with a major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure). We use AWS, but we're more interested in your ability to reason about distributed systems generally than in prior AWS-specific experience

Benefits and Pay

Our headquarters are located near New York City's Union Square. We believe in cross team collaboration. We think good ideas can come from anyone, and we've designed our processes to encourage participation from all. While we take our mission seriously, we don't take ourselves too seriously. We like to host offsites, outings, and team meals where we can connect as people, not just as colleagues. We offer office lunch and a fully stocked snack bar. While we are an in office culture, we allow up to 2 remote days per week.

Our benefits package for employees includes competitive base compensation along with stock options. The expected annual salary range for this role is $175,000-$230,000 USD, depending on your level of expertise, your experience, and your performance in the interview process. We also provide fully-paid health and dental insurance coverage for all of our employees, along with other health benefits including vision insurance, membership to premium primary and urgent care, and online medical health providers. We also have a take as you need time off policy, in addition to 7 paid holidays and a company wide winter break during the holidays.

EEO Statement

Sage is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, color, sex, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.

This policy applies to all employment practices within our organization, including hiring, recruiting, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, leave of absence, compensation, benefits, training, and apprenticeship. Sage makes hiring decisions based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs at the time.