Lead Software Engineer
San Jose, CA
Engineering /
Full-time /
Hybrid
About Visby
Visby Medical is an ambitious, well-funded late-stage biotech startup. Driven by a belief that infectious disease diagnosis should be quick, accurate, and accessible to all, Visby has developed the world’s first single-use PCR platform that disrupts the traditional model and redefines the way infectious disease is tested and treated.
About the Role
As the Lead Software Engineer, you will be the hands-on engineering anchor for our software team, working closely with our Director of Software and cross-functional partners. You will ensure that our frontend, backend, DevOps, and QA efforts work together as a cohesive whole, while also diving deep to resolve the hardest technical problems when needed.
This role emphasizes technical leadership, system reliability, and problem-solving rather than owning day-to-day execution in one area. You’ll partner with our dedicated frontend and backend/infra engineers to ensure that the Visby Digital Companion software performs reliably across devices, scales effectively in production, and integrates seamlessly with our diagnostic hardware and healthcare systems.
How You'll Make An Impact
- Technical Leadership & Problem Solving
- Serve as the go-to engineer for diagnosing and solving cross-cutting technical issues (e.g., Terraform/Terragrunt deployment failures, concurrency bugs, device/app compatibility, caching, CI/CD bottlenecks).
- Ensure backend and infrastructure meet reliability, scalability, and security needs, working in partnership with the backend/infra engineer. Step in when deep debugging or architectural decisions are required.
- Ensure frontend meets performance and compatibility requirements across a wide range of iOS and Android devices, working in partnership with the frontend engineer. Step in when issues arise with device hardware differences (e.g., cameras), caching, or OS-level changes.
- Guide the integration of on-device ML algorithms (e.g., TensorFlow Lite, CoreML, PyTorch) developed by our data science team, ensuring they are efficiently packaged, deployed, and monitored in production apps.
- Collaborate with QA to build robust testing strategies that capture integration issues across frontend, backend, and device ecosystems.
- System Cohesion & Architecture
- Collaborate with the Director of Software on system design and technical strategy, ensuring that frontend, backend, and infra components fit together cleanly.
- Provide guidance and oversight so features are implemented in a way that is scalable, testable, and maintainable.
- Establish standards and best practices for coding, testing, deployment, monitoring, and security across the team.
- Develop and maintain written procedures and documentation for software development, deployment, and maintenance to support continuity, quality, and regulatory compliance.
- Collaboration & Mentorship
- Mentor engineers (frontend, backend/infra, QA) to raise the technical bar and encourage a culture of problem ownership.
- Act as the technical bridge between software and the broader R&D team (assay scientists, hardware engineers, product managers).
- Contribute to regulatory compliance efforts (IEC 62304:2006 for medical device software).
On Your First Day We'd Like You to Have
- Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field (or equivalent hands-on experience).
- 7+ years of experience in software engineering, with significant full-stack exposure.
- Proven track record of diagnosing and fixing complex system issues across frontend, backend, and infrastructure.
- Flutter/Dart for mobile development (iOS/Android).
- Kotlin or Java backend development.
- Cloud platforms (GCP preferred).
- Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/Terragrunt).
- Kubernetes and containerized deployments.
- CI/CD pipelines and release engineering.
- Modern database systems (relational and non-relational).
- Proven experience ensuring mobile application performance and compatibility across diverse iOS and Android devices, including expertise in handling camera hardware/software differences, caching strategies, and OS-level changes.
- Exposure to ML/AI integration, with an understanding of how to package, deploy, and monitor models as part of a production software system.
- Experience working in or adjacent to regulated industries (healthcare, medical devices, fintech) a plus.
It's Great If You Have
- Experience with mobile camera APIs and optimization techniques for consistent performance across device generations.
- Familiarity with medical device software standards (IEC 62304:2006).
- Experience with Firebase services (e.g., Firestore, Auth, Crashlytics).
- Knowledge of security best practices for mobile and cloud applications.
- Prior experience in small, high-growth startups.
About The Team
- You will join a small, high-performing R&D software team consisting of a frontend engineer, backend/dev ops engineer, and QA engineer, alongside a fractional Director of Software. With our product already FDA-cleared and commercially available, your role will be to help stabilize, scale, and harden our systems for widespread deployment. You will provide senior-level technical guidance and hands-on problem-solving capacity to ensure our software remains reliable, scalable, and adaptable as we grow.
Salary Range
- 180,000-200,000 (salary range for candidates based in San Jose, CA)
- Compensation for the role is based on geographical location.
- Compensation also depends on a number of factors including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience and may fall outside of the range shown.
More about our benefits
Visby offers highly competitive health insurance through United Healthcare or Kaiser, including a company-funded HSA option. We also offer flexible paid time off, 10 company holidays, and many other contemporary benefits and perks.
Visby is a proud recipient of the 2023 Cigna Healthy Workforce Designation.
Additional information
We believe that the unique contributions of all Visbees is the driver of our success. To make sure that our products and culture continue to incorporate everyone's perspectives and experience we never discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, national origin, ancestry, sex, gender, pregnancy or related medical conditions, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, or military or veteran status.
Full COVID Vaccination Required - Reasonable accommodations for medical or religious reasons considered.
