Software Engineer, Automation
New York, NY
Lab Automation – Software /
Full Time /
On-site
Radical AI, Inc. is an artificial intelligence company that is accelerating scientific research & development. We are at the forefront of innovation in the field of materials R&D, a critical driver for advancing our most cutting-edge industries and shaping the future. Breaking away from the traditionally slow and costly R&D process, Radical AI leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to pioneer generative materials science. This innovative field blends AI, engineering, and materials science, revolutionizing how materials are created and discovered. Radical AI's approach speeds up R&D and addresses global challenges, setting new benchmarks in technology and sustainability.
As a Software Engineer at Radical, you’ll design and build core infrastructure that underpins how software interacts with hardware in our autonomous labs. You’ll own foundational components such as device drivers, telemetry pipelines, fault recovery systems, and simulation environments. Your code will run in close proximity to real-world instruments—executing experiments, managing state, and ensuring safe and deterministic behavior in our hardware stack.
We work in a deeply technical domain—robotics, ML, and experimental automation—and your software will directly control and monitor systems in the real world.
You’re a systems-minded engineer who thrives in environments where the boundary between software and hardware is thin. You’ve built software that runs close to the metal and you think about how systems fail just as much as how they succeed.
You may not have done all of the following, but the prospect of learning and owning these technologies excites you:
About You
- Strong systems programming experience in Python, Rust, or C++. You’ve written real-world state machines, gRPC or protobuf-based APIs, or low-latency services that operate on real or simulated hardware.
- Deep familiarity with concurrent and asynchronous programming, including event loops, cancellation semantics, bounded queues, and task orchestration under failure modes. You know how to handle timeouts, retries, and device-level race conditions.
- Frontend engineering experience with Svelte, React, or similar frameworks. You’ve built responsive, real-time interfaces and care about state management, testing, and usability. You’ve worked with structured APIs and understand browser performance implications.
- You’ve built and debugged protocol-aware interfaces for serial, TCP, USB, I²C, or similar buses. You understand framing, handshake patterns, and flow control when dealing with instruments or embedded systems.
- You’ve designed device orchestration layers that can execute long-running procedures, monitor device health, and stream telemetry. You know how to propagate failure states and build for partial availability.
- Experience building or contributing to hardware simulation environments, mocking hardware APIs, and running integration tests with virtual devices. You understand the value of simulation not just for testing, but for CI and parallel development.
- You’ve worked on telemetry pipelines using structured logs and time-series data, built systems for ingesting and querying device state, and understand the differences between high-frequency signal capture vs sparse control logs.
- Experience designing and operating fault-tolerant distributed systems, where retries, idempotency, dead-letter queues, and safe rollback are all table stakes.
- You think about observability by default—instrumenting code with structured logs, metrics, traces, and ensuring diagnostics can be surfaced without modifying code post-deployment.
- You’ve built for on-prem, reproducible deployment, and understand the challenges of deploying to a real lab where hardware, software, and network conditions are rarely ideal.
Pluses
- Experience with embedded protocols (e.g., serial, I²C, Modbus), device virtualization, or microcontroller firmware.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes and containerization in lab settings.
- Contributions to systems for robotics, automation, or manufacturing infrastructure.
- Comfort designing reproducible and testable systems for devices that don’t always behave perfectly.
What we offer
- A competitive compensation package also includes the best in benefits:
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family
- Mental health and wellness support
- Unlimited PTO and 14+ company holidays per year
- 401K
- Work closely with a team on the cutting edge of AI research.
- A mission: an opportunity to fundamentally change the way humanity makes progress through materials science discovery.
$200,000 - $250,000 a year
+ Equity + Benefits; base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.
Radical AI is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, marital status, disability, or veteran status.
