Founding Engineer

New York, NYSoftware Engineering – Core Software /Full Time /On-siteCompany is replacing an R&D process that currently takes 10+ years and $100 million to produce a single discovery. Our self-driving lab platform combines AI with autonomous robotics to run experiments, analyze results, and iterate—continuously, without human bottlenecks. For industries like aerospace, automotive, defense, energy, manufacturing, semiconductors, and space, that means breakthroughs in weeks instead of years.The RoleThis is a generalist software engineering role on the team building the core platform that powers our autonomous lab. Depending on where you plug in, you might own backend services, agent tooling, data and orchestration pipelines, internal platforms, or the infrastructure that keeps our systems observable and reliable in production.What's non-negotiable: strong systems thinking, production instincts, and the ability to contribute across the stack. We're building software that controls and monitors physical systems in the real world — the bar for correctness and reliability is high.We work across a deeply cross-disciplinary domain (robotics, ML, experimental automation), and one near-term priority involves hybrid cloud/on-prem deployments in customer environments. Engineers who've navigated those constraints will hit the ground running.What You'll Work OnLab backend: experiment definitions, sample path-planning, long running durable task executionData backend: database schemas, migrations, ETL pipelines, object storage + partition designInternal platforms: developer tooling, SDKs, shared services, service templatesObservability and reliability: structured logs, metrics, tracing, production debugging (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana)Hybrid infrastructure: cloud + on-prem, containerization, orchestration, infrastructure-as-codeAgent capabilities and tooling: API integrations, code execution, scientific literature retrieval, workflow automationScientific workflow orchestration: Bayesian optimization loops, experiment scheduling, long-running job execution, retries, idempotencyData pipelines for ingesting, transforming, and serving data to models and LLMsWhat We're Looking For5–6+ years of production software engineering experience; strong enough to design, build, and ship end-to-endFluency in Go and/or Python; additional stack experience (TypeScript, Rust) is welcomeDeep comfort with distributed systems: timeouts, retries, idempotency, partial failure, dead-letter queues, safe rollbackExperience with concurrent and asynchronous programming — event loops, cancellation semantics, bounded queues, task orchestration under failureSolid networking fundamentals (especially important for potential on-prem deployment contexts)Containerization and cloud deployment experience (Kubernetes, AWS); comfort debugging Linux systemsHigh ownership: you find problems before they find users and raise the bar for qualityNice to haveExperience with agentic systems or LLM workflows (tool-calling, context management, PydanticAI, LangChain)Experience with enterprise self-hosted storage solutions (Ceph/Rook, Longhorn, WEKA, VAST, TrueNAS)Ray framework experienceFamiliarity with MongoDB and gRPCCI/CD and DevSecOps experience (GitHub Actions, Gitlab Pipelines)Familiarity with embedded protocols (serial, I²C, Modbus), device virtualization, or microcontroller firmwareStrong observability experience (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, distributed tracing)Frontend experience (TypeScript/Svelte/React) — real-time interfaces, state management, structured APIsWork ArrangementThis role is based in our New York City lab, and we are in person 5 days per week.What We OfferA competitive compensation package also includes the best in benefits:Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, covered at 100%Mental health and wellness supportUnlimited PTO and 14+ company holidays per yearCompany-wide end-of-year shutdown, including two weeks of paid time off401KEquity