Principal Software Engineer

Midjourney

• $162K — $195K *
San Francisco, CA 94112Hybrid
Enterprise Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Today
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Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Deep software architecture experience in complex systems such as robotics, instrumentation, and medical devices.
  • Strong expertise in Python with a focus on concurrency and performance engineering.
  • Proven ability to deliver observable and resilient systems.
  • Demonstrated technical leadership capabilities, including mentoring and making pragmatic trade-offs.

Responsibilities

  • Act as the technical lead for the scanner platform's architecture and maintainability.
  • Own core runtime functions such as distributed control and fault handling.
  • Drive rigorous engineering practices including code quality and testability.
  • Build observability features such as logs and metrics for system diagnostics.
  • Collaborate with hardware and ML teams on data and interface definitions.
  • Lead complex refactoring initiatives without disrupting ongoing development.

Benefits

  • Collaborative work environment with teams across disciplines.
  • Opportunity to impact core technology in a cutting-edge field.
  • Focus on reliability and maintainability, which emphasizes long-term project health.
Full Job Description
What you'll do
  1. Act as the technical lead for large parts of the scanner platform: system architecture, codebase structure, and long-term maintainability.
  2. Own core runtime foundations: distributed control, state management, fault handling, and reliability.
  3. Drive engineering rigor: testability, code quality, review standards, performance regression prevention, and release processes.
  4. Build robust observability: logs, metrics, traces, and replayable diagnostics (with privacy constraints).
  5. Collaborate with hardware and recon/ML teams to define interfaces, data contracts, timing/synchronization, and failure modes.
  6. Lead complex refactors (e.g., message passing / RPC boundaries, modularization, concurrency model) without halting forward progress.
What we're looking for
  • Deep software architecture experience for real-world systems: robotics, instrumentation, medical devices, or other complex distributed products.
  • Strong Python and concurrency background (asyncio, multiprocessing, profiling, performance engineering).
  • Track record of shipping systems that are observable, debuggable, and resilient.
  • Strong technical leadership: clarity, pragmatic trade-offs, and mentoring.
Useful experience
  • Building but rock-solid systems: clear interfaces (gRPC/protobuf or equivalent), strong state modeling, and failure handling.
  • High-leverage engineering habits on a lean team: good tests, CI, reproducible dev environments, and fast code review.
  • Practical performance + concurrency work in Python (asyncio, profiling, multiprocessing) and comfort debugging distributed behavior.
  • Security-minded device software: safe defaults, encrypted data paths, and disciplined handling of PII/PHI.
  • Operational thinking: remote updates/management, excellent logging, and diagnostics that make real hardware debuggable.
* Ladders Estimates

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