Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead
Merge Labs1 month ago
Base Salary
$225k - $305k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own important software from problem definition through implementation, deployment, and continued operation.
- Translate ambiguous experimental needs into software milestones with clear acceptance criteria.
- Build and improve interfaces between applications, instrument SDKs, data systems, and supporting infrastructure.
- Solve integration, concurrency, performance, and recovery problems with SDK and application engineers.
- Make decisions about languages, architecture, reuse, and build-versus-buy tradeoffs.
- Establish testing, observability, and release practices that improve reliability and research velocity.
- Create workflows for recording high-volume experimental data, managing storage and metadata, and moving data through analysis.
- Review code, mentor peers, and communicate technical tradeoffs to scientists and engineers.
- Collaborate with the team manager on prioritization and capacity-aware commitments.
Requirements
- Demonstrated experience personally delivering substantial software systems and supporting them after release.
- Strong coding and debugging skills, sound software fundamentals, and ability to learn unfamiliar technologies.
- Experience making architecture decisions across multiple components and explaining simplification tradeoffs.
- Good judgment regarding reliability, data integrity, performance, and operational failure modes.
- Evidence of helping engineers deliver through code review, mentoring, and collaboration.
- Comfort with hands-on work in a small team whose priorities evolve with experimental evidence.
About Merge Labs
Merge Labs is a privately held research lab developing high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces that integrate with advanced AI to augment human capability. It builds experimental platforms and automated pipelines across molecular engineering, synthetic biology, neuroscience, advanced microscopy, sequencing, and mammalian cell culture to accelerate BCI R&D. Founded in 2025, the company focuses on safe, accessible neurotechnology rather than commercial products today.