combucha

Principal Software Engineer

San Francisco, CAOn-site$268,000 – $279,000 a year

  • Last verified on Ashby
Apply on Ashby (opens jobs.ashbyhq.com)

Opens jobs.ashbyhq.com, the employer’s own posting. Combucha never applies for you.

Ask about this role

The posting

From Midjourney’s Ashby board, as written by the employer.

What you’ll do

  1. Act as the technical lead for large parts of the scanner platform: system architecture, codebase structure, and long-term maintainability.
  2. Own core runtime foundations: distributed control, state management, fault handling, and reliability.
  3. Drive engineering rigor: testability, code quality, review standards, performance regression prevention, and release processes.
  4. Build robust observability: logs, metrics, traces, and replayable diagnostics (with privacy constraints).
  5. Collaborate with hardware and recon/ML teams to define interfaces, data contracts, timing/synchronization, and failure modes.
  6. 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.

More at Midjourney

  1. Senior Product Designer

    San Francisco, CAHybridSeniorresearch

    $200K–$285K

    Confirmed · on the company's site

  2. QA Analyst

    USHybrid

    $100K–$125K

    Confirmed · on the company's site

  3. Product Manager

    San Francisco, CAHybridManagerresearch

    $185K–$225K

    Confirmed · on the company's site

  4. Principal Machine Learning Engineer (Reconstruction / Quantitative Imaging)

    San Francisco, CAOn-sitePrincipalevals

    $290K–$302K

    Confirmed · on the company's site

  5. Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Clinical Team)

    San Francisco, CAHybridSenior

    $237K–$250K

    Confirmed · on the company's site