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Senior Software Engineer, Platform SDK / Instrument Control

Merge Labs· Applications
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San Francisco Bay Area$185k - $260kFull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Senior Software Engineer responsible for turning Merge's custom-built instruments into reusable APIs and a coherent device abstraction, enabling scientists to write protocols in Python and supporting high-throughput measurement platforms with real-time control and scalable data acquisition.

Responsibilities

  • 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.

Qualifications

  • 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.

Skills

Required:Real-time device controlAPI/SDK designConcurrency and performance

Benefits

  • Offers Equity
  • Competitive compensation: $185K – $260K
  • Full-time employment
  • On-site role in San Francisco Bay Area
Last updated Oct 7, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Merge Labs

Introducing Merge Labs

Meet Merge Labs – a research lab with the long-term mission of bridging biological and artificial intelligence to maximize human ability, agency, and experience.

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