Senior​/Staff Software Engineer - C++

Senior / Staff Software Engineer (C++ and Systems)

Confidential client. Search led by Volt Force.

Location:

San Francisco Bay Area (on-site) Job Type: Full-time

Volt Force is working with an early-stage materials-inspection company on the search for a Senior or Staff Software Engineer. Our client helps manufacturers make better, safer, and more reliable micro- and nano-scale materials, the building blocks of critical sectors like energy storage, semiconductors, aerospace, and power systems. As demand surges and production goes more complex and faster, small undetected variations during manufacturing lead to waste, lower performance, higher cost, and safety risk, leaving manufacturers with little visibility into the quality of what they produce.

The company's platform changes that. It non-destructively probes materials during production, pairing a novel sensing approach with physics-informed machine learning to capture real-time signals that conventional measurement techniques cannot access. Those signals give manufacturers rare visibility into how materials behave as they are made.

The company turns that hidden data into actionable intelligence, helping manufacturers reduce variability and increase yield and performance. The platform can run as a standalone tool or integrate directly into production lines, it is already in early deployment with leading global manufacturers, and the first commercial product is on the way.

Our client is seeking a Senior or Staff Software Engineer to design and build the high-performance, systems-level software at the core of the company's platform. You will own software components end to end, from architecture and design through implementation, optimization, and release, working close to the operating system and hardware to deliver the performance the product depends on.

Working across software, firmware, and hardware teams, you will develop and optimize modern C++ software for Linux-based systems, design multi-threaded and asynchronous architectures, and debug complex issues that span the software and hardware boundary. This role suits an engineer who takes ownership of their work, writes clean and maintainable code, and enjoys understanding how software interacts with operating systems and hardware to achieve exceptional performance in real customer environments.

• Design, develop, and optimize high-performance software using modern C++ (C++17/20)
• Develop scalable, reliable, and maintainable software for Linux-based systems
• Design multi-threaded and asynchronous software architectures
• Analyze, profile, and optimize software performance across CPU, memory, storage, networking, and I/O
• Read, understand, maintain, and enhance existing Python code used for automation, testing, and data analysis
• Collaborate closely with firmware, hardware, and application engineering teams
• Participate in software architecture, technical design, and code reviews
• Debug complex system-level issues across software and hardware boundaries
• Take ownership of software components throughout the product development lifecycle

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field
• 5+ years of professional software development experience for a Senior hire, or 8+ years for a Staff hire
• Strong proficiency in modern C++ (C++17/20)
• Working knowledge of Python, with the ability to read, understand, maintain, and modify existing Python code
• Strong experience developing software on Linux
• Strong understanding of operating systems, memory management, multi-threading and concurrency, software architecture, and performance optimization
• Excellent debugging and problem-solving skills
• Experience using Git and modern software development workflows

• Experience designing and developing large-scale commercial software systems
• Experience developing and shipping software for commercial products
• Experience with scientific instrumentation or data acquisition systems
• Experience collaborating with firmware and hardware engineering teams
• Familiarity with low-latency, real-time, or data acquisition software systems
• Experience developing desktop applications using Qt Widgets and Qt Charts
• Familiarity with scientific computing, signal processing, physics, or machine learning

• Experience with Linux systems programming
• Experience with performance profiling tools such as perf or Valgrind
• Experience with CMake and GDB
• Familiarity with Embedded Linux
• Experience with hardware communication interfaces such as Ethernet, USB, PCIe, or Serial
• Familiarity with CI/CD and automated testing