Senior Software Engineer - Instrument

Join Rivercell, an ambitious biotech startup, as a Senior Software Engineer. You will be responsible for the architecture, development, integration, testing, and delivery of the instrument operating platform. This platform will control hardware, execute biological protocols, monitor device performance, manage failures, and ensure the traceable acquisition of experimental data. You will work closely with an interdisciplinary team and have the opportunity to make a significant impact in the field of biotechnology.

You are deeply proficient in Python, including concurrency, process isolation, performance profiling, typing, packaging, testing, and the judgment not to be clever when reliability matters.

Responsibilities

• Help define the overall instrument-software architecture, including hardware abstraction, device services, orchestration, protocol execution, sensing, quality control, observability, testing, and operator applications.
• Write and review production code, own critical shared components, and set the standard for development quality, simplicity, documentation, and velocity.
• Design stable hardware-abstraction layers and versioned interfaces, design the state machines, workflow engine, scheduling systems, and configuration model required to execute long-duration biological protocols.
• You combine strong architectural judgment with a willingness to debug hardware interfaces, inspect logs, write test harnesses, and solve practical problems at the bench.
• When faced with a large system, you instinctively identify the smallest end-to-end architecture that can produce a useful working version within weeks, using simulation, reusable components, and AI-assisted development effectively.

High-throughput image, video, or sensor-data acquisition and transfer

• Simulation environments, digital twins, software-in-the-loop, or hardware-in-the-loop testing
• Operator interfaces and engineering applications for complex instruments

Requirements

• You have 5+ years of relevant experience in software engineering, including responsibility for the architecture and delivery of complex production systems.
• You have a track record of building software that controls physical equipment, such as scientific instruments, robotics, medical devices, semiconductor tools, industrial automation, or laboratory systems.
• You are comfortable with ambiguity in a scientific environment: specifications will evolve as the biology and hardware teach us, and you know how to design systems that can evolve without becoming chaotic.
• You are autonomous, committed, enthusiastic, and comfortable working with a can-do, creative, and challenging mindset.
• You are rigorous in system design, testing, documentation, data interpretation, incident analysis, and communication of uncertainty.
• You have excellent communication skills and are fluent in English; professional proficiency in French is helpful but not required.
• You have previous experience or knowledge in one or more of the following areas:
• Event-driven, distributed, or service-oriented architectures for physical systems
• Workflow engines, state machines, complex orchestration, scheduling, or distributed control systems
• Real-time, near-real-time, deterministic, or safety-relevant control systems
• Linux-based deployment, containers, observability, networking, remote diagnostics, and automated software updates
• Computer vision or image analysis at scale, particularly for microscopy, tracking, or closed-loop control

Preferred

• Device communication over serial, USB, Ethernet, SCPI or similar protocols