Software Engineer, Applications & Systems for Experiments

Merge Labs; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Merge Labs is seeking a generalist software engineer to build experimental applications and workflows. You will turn instrument APIs into user-configurable software, collaborate closely with the SDK engineer, and expand capabilities across the stack.

You will contribute to backend services, data integration, and tooling while maintaining clear ownership, robust testing, and trustworthy data handling. This role offers breadth across systems and direct impact on research workflows.

Qualifications

• Strong coding and debugging fundamentals showcased in completed projects.
• Experience building applications, services or tools, with curiosity to understand adjacent layers.
• Comfort using APIs, writing tests and collaborating through version control and code review.
• Practical approach to learning unfamiliar systems and asking for help early.
• Care for clear user workflows, trustworthy data and understandable failure behavior.

Responsibilities

• Build applications and interactive tools for configuring experiments, monitoring execution, visualizing results and capturing metadata.
• Pair directly with the SDK engineer to integrate instrument capabilities and improve interfaces.
• Keep reusable experiment logic separate from presentation code so workflows support both interactive use and automation.
• Implement practical failure handling, cancellation, recovery, logging and testing.
• Connect application outputs to data services with clear metadata and version information.
• Contribute to backend services, data integration, developer tooling, CI, packaging and other parts of the stack.
• Diagnose problems beyond the UI and work with specialists on performance, concurrency, native code or hardware interfaces.
• Work directly with scientists and engineers to understand a workflow, ship a useful first version and improve it.
• Own your changes through review, release, documentation and follow-up.

Skills

APIs

Testing

Version control

Code review

Tools

Python

C++

Rust

Job description

Merge Labs is seeking a generalist software engineer to build experimental applications and workflows. You will turn instrument APIs into user-configurable software, collaborate closely with the SDK engineer, and expand capabilities across the stack.

You will contribute to backend services, data integration, and tooling while maintaining clear ownership, robust testing, and trustworthy data handling. This role offers breadth across systems and direct impact on research workflows.