Principal Software Engineer
Principal Software Engineer at Midjourney — San Francisco, CA, US
- Company: Midjourney
- Location: San Francisco, CA, US
- Employment type: Full-time
- Posted: 2026-06-30
About this role
WHAT YOU’LL DO
- Act as the technical lead for large parts of the scanner platform: system architecture, codebase structure, and long-term maintainability.
- Own core runtime foundations: distributed control, state management, fault handling, and reliability.
- Drive engineering rigor: testability, code quality, review standards, performance regression prevention, and release processes.
- Build robust observability: logs, metrics, traces, and replayable diagnostics (with privacy constraints).
- Collaborate with hardware and recon/ML teams to define interfaces, data contracts, timing/synchronization, and failure modes.
- Lead complex refactors (e.g., message passing / RPC boundaries, modularization, concurrency model) without halting forward progress.
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR
- Deep software architecture experience for real-world systems: robotics, instrumentation, medical devices, or other complex distributed products.
- Strong Python and concurrency background (asyncio, multiprocessing, profiling, performance engineering).
- Track record of shipping systems that are observable, debuggable, and resilient.
- Strong technical leadership: clarity, pragmatic trade-offs, and mentoring.
USEFUL EXPERIENCE
- Building but rock-solid systems: clear interfaces (gRPC/protobuf or equivalent), strong state modeling, and failure handling.
- High-leverage engineering habits on a lean team: good tests, CI, reproducible dev environments, and fast code review.
- Practical performance + concurrency work in Python (asyncio, profiling, multiprocessing) and comfort debugging distributed behavior.
- Security-minded device software: safe defaults, encrypted data paths, and disciplined handling of PII/PHI.
- Operational thinking: remote updates/management, excellent logging, and diagnostics that make real hardware debuggable.
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