Staff Software Engineer

Job Summary & Responsibilities

The Staff Software Engineer will play a key role in architecting and developing software that enables reliable wafer handling, robotics coordination, safety interlocks, motion control, system orchestration, and factory automation interfaces for a standardized EFEM (Equipment Front End Module) platform. This role involves designing and implementing reusable software components, integrating hardware subsystems, and contributing to a scalable architecture adopted across Onto products.

The ideal candidate has strong experience in structured real-time software design, complex electromechanical systems, HW/SW integration. Key Responsibilities:

• Act as lead software engineer on new projects, determining requirements and a robust design, and collaborating with hardware engineers to ensure seamless hardware-software integration
• Develop software modules for wafer-handling robotics, load ports, sensors, pre-aligners, and system-level orchestration
• Design of extensible APIs, control interfaces, and internal communication frameworks
• Optimize software performance and ensure scalability
• Provide mentoring and guidance to more junior team members
• Develop automated tests, simulation tools, and validation frameworks for EFEM software
• Perform system-level troubleshooting, data analysis, and optimization of EFEM software performance
• Identify and drive process, architecture, and code quality improvements across the EFEM software stack and across multiple teams/modules

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Proven experience (10+ years for Staff level) in software development for highly technical applications, including leading architecture/design of large-scale, mission-critical software systems.
• Experience driving technical roadmaps, resolving cross-team dependencies, and making tradeoffs across performance, maintainability, and schedule.
• Strong knowledge of hardware-software integration and experience working with complex systems.
• Mastery of C# using modern features.
• Deep expertise in .NET including runtime behavior, performance, threading, and memory management.
• Mastery of concurrency design: multithreading, synchronization, message passing, actor models, and preventing deadlocks/race conditions.
• Experience designing/maintaining APIs and integration points: Internal IPC (gRPC, message bus, shared memory, etc.), External interfaces (factory host integration, equipment automation).
• Demonstrated experience debugging complex multi-threaded environments.
• Ability to travel both domestically (~10%) and internationally (infrequent and only when needed).

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in the semiconductor industry, robotics, or similar sector.
• Experience with SEMI standards such as E84, E87, E90, E30, E37.