Principal Software Engineer

Midjourney

San Francisco Full-time $268K – $279K/yr 4 mo ago
Workplace
On-site
Location
San Francisco
Who can apply
Based in the United States: you usually need the right to work there

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About the role

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.

About Software Engineer jobs in the United States

Open jobs
6,418 open Software Engineer jobs in the United States, 786 of them posted in the last 7 days. See all Software Engineer jobs in the United States
Typical advertised pay
$165,000 – $229,000 a year for the middle half of the 3,673 job ads from 904 employers that state a salary in US dollars (median $198,000). This is base pay as advertised, not total compensation. Software Engineer salary in the United States
Skills the job ads ask for most
  • Python 48%
  • CI/CD 36%
  • Code review 32%
  • AWS 31%
  • Kubernetes 29%
  • TypeScript 26%

Share of the 453 newest postings for the role that name each skill. Resume keywords for Software Engineer jobs

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