Senior Software Engineer

About the role

This is a senior, hands-on engineering role on the Development team. You'll be building, not managing a team. You'll work on the core software platform at the center of Satomic's chemistry operations: the orchestration layer, internal tooling, and data systems that move a synthesis request from intake through execution to result. You'll work closely with the hiring manager and the rest of Development, alongside automation engineers, chemists, and our ML and cheminformatics teams, with the scope you own growing as the platform does.

About Satomic

Satomic’s mission is to close the gap from idea to molecule with faster navigation of chemical space. We are building an automated chemistry platform that integrates laboratory robotics, software, and AI to transform small-molecule synthesis and drug discovery.

Expected Outcomes

• By day 30, you will have developed a working understanding of the platform end-to-end, including how a request flows from intake through automated synthesis to result and where the software seams and pain points are.
• Shipped meaningful improvements or features into production, with tests and documentation.
• Engaged with the existing roadmap and critical path to identify and sequence their own near-term priorities, flagging dependencies and risks along the way.
• Delivered at least one core service or system component that other teams build against, with a clear interface and a solid understanding of its failure modes.
• Established or strengthened the engineering practices around your work (testing, deployment, observability) so the team can move faster with confidence.
• Seen your work run under real production load as we (ambitiously) begin shipping platform deliveries to customers — making real-world impact by the end of this window.
• Partnered with the automation and chemistry teams to ensure platform runs produce structured, traceable data through the systems you work on.
• Become a primary owner of a major surface area of the platform, making architectural decisions on it independently.
• Kept those systems reliable as the underlying chemistry and automation requirements shifted, evolving the architecture to hold up under real change.
• Raised the engineering bar on the team through the systems you build, the reviews you give, and the practices you help establish.
• Become a recognized technical leader within Satomic, shaping how the company builds software and mentoring strong engineers.
• Built core platform systems that have scaled through multiple generations of chemistry capability without accumulating architectural debt that slows the company down.
• Made the software platform a durable competitive advantage in how Satomic runs chemistry at scale.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building and operating production software, with demonstrated ownership of systems end-to-end: design, delivery, and the consequences of running them in production.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: data modeling, API and service design, testing, and reasoning about reliability and failure.
• Strong Python (backend) and TypeScript/React (frontend) required, paired with genuine enthusiasm for the craft of software engineering and a demonstrated ability (or clear eagerness) to pick up new languages and reach for the right tool, whether that's Rust, Go, C++, or something else.
• Comfort reasoning about how your code performs, and the judgment to know when performance matters and when it doesn't.
• A track record of sound technical judgment, and of working across disciplines to understand what actually needs to be built.
• Solid working knowledge of relational databases and SQL such as Postgres, including schema design, query performance, and modeling data you can trust.
• Experience designing and operating APIs and distributed systems (REST/gRPC, message queues), with sound judgment about service boundaries and failure handling.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and comfort owning your slice of infrastructure: infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, observability, and operating services in production.
• Bonus: experience building software at the intersection of the physical and digital world, such as laboratory automation, robotics, instrumentation, scientific data, or similarly messy real-world systems.