Position: Senior Python Engineer
Location: San Carlos, CA
Priority: Immediate
The Opportunity
We are looking for a Senior Python Engineer to work on a sophisticated scientific instrument platform. This engineer will be embedded with the engineering team in San Carlos, California and will initially focus on modernizing the instrument's configuration-management architecture.
The instrument currently relies on a large, monolithic configuration structure containing thousands of lines of configuration data covering electrical layouts, port mappings, peripheral configurations, device calibrations, and custom hardware interfaces.
The immediate objective is to redesign this into a modular, schema-driven, validated, and version-controlled configuration architecture without disrupting the existing instrument software.
This is not a traditional web/backend development role. The engineer will work within an existing production instrument-control codebase and must be comfortable understanding how software configuration ultimately affects physical hardware.
Key Responsibilities
• Understand and navigate an existing Python-based instrument-control codebase.
• Analyze dependencies between configuration data, calibration data, software components, and physical devices.
• Break down a large monolithic YAML-based configuration into modular, maintainable configuration and calibration files.
• Design strongly defined configuration schemas and data models.
• Implement configuration parsing, validation, serialization, and error handling.
• Build model/graph structures representing relationships between instrument components and configuration data.
• Maintain backward compatibility with existing instrument configurations and workflows.
• Introduce appropriate configuration versioning and migration strategies.
• Improve fault isolation so configuration errors do not unnecessarily impact the entire instrument.
• Establish foundations for future automated backup, synchronization, and centralized/cloud configuration management.
• Write maintainable, well-tested, well-documented production code.
• Work directly with software, hardware, and systems engineers where documentation and requirements may initially be incomplete.
• Participate in debugging and validation directly against physical instruments.
Required Skills
• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong hands-on development experience with Python.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, data modeling, validation, and object-oriented design.
• Experience with structured configuration formats such as YAML, JSON, XML, or similar.
• Experience designing schemas, validation frameworks, configuration-management systems, or metadata-driven architectures.
• Strong understanding of versioning, backward compatibility, migrations, and error handling.
• Comfortable working in Linux environments, including command-line tools, permissions, processes, logs, and basic device management.
• Experience navigating and modifying large existing codebases rather than only building greenfield applications.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills.
• Experience writing automated tests for backend/system-level software.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to operate effectively when documentation and requirements are incomplete.
Strongly Preferred
• Experience with hardware/software integration, scientific instruments, robotics, laboratory automation, industrial automation, medical devices, semiconductor equipment, manufacturing systems, or similar physical systems.
• Experience with Pydantic, JSON Schema, dataclasses, Marshmallow, or similar Python modeling/validation frameworks.
• Experience interacting with custom hardware or firmware from Python.
• Experience with telemetry or device-state management.
• Experience with AWS or cloud-connected device architectures.
• Familiarity with FastAPI.
• Familiarity with React, TypeScript, or Tauri is a plus but is not the primary requirement.
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