About the Role
We're hiring a senior engineer to lead the edge platform behind our kiosk fleet, the Linux/Python stack that runs on every device in the field, the cloud IoT services it talks to, and the tooling that keeps it healthy. The platform is built and in production. Your job is to harden it, secure it, and grow it, not to rewrite it.
This is a player-coach role. You'll spend most of your time writing and reviewing code, but you'll also directly manage one engineer, including 1:1s, goals, feedback, and career growth. If you want to be a pure IC or a pure manager, this isn't the right fit. If you've been doing both and want the title to match, keep reading.
Responsibilities
• The edge runtime: Python services on Ubuntu, packaged as snaps, talking to AWS IoT Core over MQTT, with async, systemd, and event-loop work
• The display stack: Wayland-based kiosk sessions on real hardware in the wild
• Fleet operations, including configuration management rollouts, OpenTelemetry instrumentation, and the observability work that lets us catch issues before sites do
• AWS IoT integration in depth, including devices, shadows, jobs, message routing, auth, and serverless triggers
• Multiple in-flight workstreams alongside steady reliability work, including packaging modernization and a fleet data-model refactor
• One direct report, including their growth, feedback loop, and career development
• Code review leadership, setting the bar for edge and IoT code from day one
Qualifications
Strong, recent experience across most of the following:
• Python at the systems level (async, systemd, MQTT, event loops)
• Snap packaging and modern Ubuntu LTS
• Wayland-based kiosk display stacks
• AWS IoT Core in production, not just familiarity with it
• A modern configuration management tool for fleet rollouts
• OpenTelemetry instrumentation
• Linux edge and device fundamentals, with a real understanding of what is happening on the box
You should be senior enough to review a peer's edge code in your first week without hesitation. This is a niche domain with a small reviewer pool inside the team, and we need you to help expand it. [Add specific years-of-experience expectation, e.g. "8+ years in backend or platform engineering, with meaningful edge or IoT exposure."]
Preferred Qualifications (Not Required)
• Cellular edge routers and their SDKs
• IP camera / NVR integration (RTSP, ONVIF)
• Prometheus-family observability tooling
• Exposure to adjacent stack: Rails (light read-and-extend work on a couple of internal apps), Electron (adapter-level maintenance only), serverless functions, internal package distribution
What This Role Is Not
We want to be upfront about scope so you can self-select:
• Not a greenfield rebuild. We are hardening a working platform, not rewriting it
• Not cloud infrastructure-as-code work, which is owned elsewhere
• Not web or frontend product work
• Not deep distro-level packaging or notebook/data tooling
• Not pure management with no coding. This role is blended, and you will ship
How We Work
We bias toward incremental hardening, observability, and bug elimination over net-new abstractions. We prefer fewer, better-instrumented systems to more clever ones. We are happy operating in a niche, and we expect the manager of that niche to genuinely care about the engineer reporting to them, not just the roadmap.
