Principal Platform Software Engineer (Robotics and Lab Automation)

What You’ll Do

• Design, develop, and integrate software for heterogeneous robotic systems, laboratory instruments, and automated equipment, including autonomous and non-autonomous devices.

• Own major platform components from architecture and implementation through deployment and production operation.

• Build backend services, APIs, SDKs, equipment adapters, data-ingestion components, workflow integrations, and developer tools.

• Integrate robot controllers, device drivers, vendor SDKs, and equipment interfaces for reliable command execution, status monitoring, and fault reporting.

• Work directly with robotic arms, motion controllers, sensors, actuators, PLCs, and automated material-handling systems.

• Develop reusable equipment abstractions that support multiple robot types, instrument vendors, laboratory configurations, and customers.

• Implement state machines, asynchronous execution, device coordination, persistence, and recovery from interrupted or partially completed operations.

• Connect equipment and local execution services with cloud orchestration and data platforms, addressing connectivity, latency, security, and operational constraints.

• Integrate AI-assisted planning and agentic capabilities, including tool use, context management, orchestration, and evaluation, with clear boundaries between AI decisions, deterministic execution, human approval, and physical safety systems.

• Work with scientists, product managers, hardware engineers, and AI specialists to translate customer scenarios into well-defined software capabilities.

• Guide technical design, mentor engineers, and contribute to engineering planning while remaining actively involved in coding, testing, and troubleshooting.

What You’ll Bring

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant hands-on development and integration of robotics, industrial automation, instrumentation, or other software-controlled physical systems.

• Strong programming skills in Python and one or more languages such as C++, Java, or Go, with experience delivering production software.

• Demonstrated experience integrating and commissioning robotic systems or automated equipment using controllers, sensors, actuators, vendor SDKs, and device communication interfaces.

• Practical understanding of robotics hardware, motion control, equipment operating states, timing constraints, and interactions between hardware and software.

• Experience designing reusable architectures, service APIs, typed interfaces, equipment adapters, and distributed-system components.

• Strong understanding of asynchronous execution, concurrency, message-based communication, persistence, retries, idempotency, and recovery from partial failures.

• Practical knowledge of agentic AI, including tool integration, context and state management, orchestration, evaluation, and controlled interaction with external systems.

• Experience troubleshooting complex problems across software, hardware, networking, and control systems.

• Experience with automated testing, simulation or hardware-in-the-loop testing, and system-level verification.

• Ability to independently lead substantial technical work, manage dependencies and technical risks, mentor engineers, and communicate across multidisciplinary teams.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Mechatronics, Electrical Engineering, Control Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.