Staff Software Engineer, Software Systems

Position Overview

The Staff Software Engineer is a key technical leader within Brain Corp’s Platform team, responsible for the architecture, evolution, and performance of core software systems powering our autonomous mobile robots (AMRs).

Essential Job Functions

• Lead the technical direction and architecture of the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), ensuring modularity, scalability, and long-term maintainability.
• Drive the migration and re-architecture of HAL to support next-generation robotics platforms and evolving hardware requirements.
• Own the design and evolution of the robotics telemetry and replay systems, improving observability, reliability, and data quality.
• Migrate middleware components from Python to high-performance C++ implementations.
• Architect and develop robust C++ middleware enabling efficient communication between sensors, compute, and autonomy systems.
• Integrate and bring up new hardware components, including sensors such as LiDARs, cameras, and IMUs.
• Optimize system performance across the robotics stack, including latency, throughput, memory usage, and CPU efficiency.
• Collaborate closely with hardware, apps, autonomy, and QA teams to ensure seamless system integration and deployment.
• Establish and enforce best practices in software design, code quality, testing, and documentation.
• Provide technical mentorship and leadership to engineers, guiding design reviews and complex debugging efforts.
• Contribute hands-on code to critical components while balancing long-term architectural improvements.
• Drive continuous improvement of development workflows, testing strategies, and system reliability.

Education and/or Work Experience Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Robotics, or a related technical field.
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Proven experience working on robotics systems, embedded platforms, or hardware abstraction layers (HAL).
• Demonstrated experience leading complex technical initiatives or driving architectural changes in production systems.

Required Knowledge, Skills, Abilities and Other Characteristics

• Expert-level proficiency in modern C++ (C++11 or later), including multithreading, memory management, and performance optimization.
• Strong Python skills for scripting, tooling, and system integration.
• Deep understanding of hardware abstraction layers and low-level system design.
• Hands-on experience integrating sensors such as LiDARs, cameras, and IMUs into production systems.
• Strong experience with Linux-based development environments (e.g., Ubuntu).
• Experience designing and developing middleware systems or inter-process communication frameworks.
• Familiarity with communication protocols such as MQTT, or similar paradigms.
• Experience with build systems (e.g., CMake) and unit testing frameworks (e.g., Google Test).
• Proven ability to design scalable, maintainable, and modular system architectures.
• Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills in complex robotics or embedded environments.
• Experience with system performance profiling and optimization (CPU, memory, latency, throughput).
• Proficiency with version control systems such as Git.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to provide technical leadership and mentorship without direct management responsibility.

Things that Make a Difference

• Experience with Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) or similar robotic systems.
• Prior experience leading or contributing to large-scale system re-architecture or migration efforts.
• Experience designing or improving telemetry and observability systems.
• Familiarity with custom middleware architectures (non-ROS environments).
• Background in real-time or near-real-time systems.
• Experience working at the intersection of hardware and software integration.
• Passion for robotics, automation, and building high-performance, scalable systems.