Software Engineer - Factory Automation

• Pay or shift range: $140,000 USD to $210,000 USD
  The estimated range is the budgeted amount for this position. Final offers are based on various factors, including skill set, experience, location, qualifications and other job-related reasons.

At Janicki Industries, we turn complex ideas into real-world solutions through advanced engineering and manufacturing. Our teams design and build innovative structures, tooling, and systems that support industries including aerospace, space, defense, marine, and architecture.

Across every role, from engineers and technicians to operations and support teams, our people help solve challenging problems, push the limits of design and manufacturing, and create solutions that make a lasting impact.

This position is located in Sedro Woolley, Washington State.

DEPARTMENT SUMMARY

Janicki is building a new machining facility in Montana centered on approximately 25 large five-axis mills and automating nearly everything that happens between the receiving dock and the spindle. Pallets, billets, tools, chips, and finished parts will move under machine control via AGVs, AMRs, robots, and cobots. The orchestration software for that system does not exist yet. You will write it.

This is not maintenance work. Two engineers will build the scheduling and control layer for a factory still under construction. The constraints are physical, the resources are contended, and idle spindles are not an option.

ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES

• Support a production floor with approximately 25 five-axis mills arranged along a single central traffic lane
• Coordinate AGV/AMR pallet shuttling, chip evacuation, and cutter delivery across the facility
• Enable robotic billet handling, clamping, and work preparation
• Build a scheduling and sequencing engine whose primary objective is zero spindle wait
• Develop traffic management, zone control, deadlock detection, and recovery for the central lane
• Implement look ahead material and tooling staging so the right resources arrive before the current job ends
• Coordinate fleet operations across mixed vendors and protocols, including heterogeneous coordination across shared, bidirectional lanes
• Build integration services for SAP, tool life, machine state, program status, and MES
• Develop simulation and digital-twin tooling for safe, high-volume testing
• Create operator interfaces for visibility, override, and explanation
• Treat robust exception handling as a core product capability
• Manage multiple priorities and deadlines while maintaining strong communication and collaborative working relationships
• Direct AI coding agents fluently across multi-week bodies of work not just autocomplete
• Work spec-first: define the problem, constraints, interfaces, and acceptance criteria before writing code
• Decompose work for parallel AI agents while owning the integration seams
• Engineer context deliberately, thinking in graphs for both agent workflows and the factory itself
• Apply rigorous verification, judging where AI-generated code is appropriate versus where code must remain small, deterministic, and hand-reviewed
• Continuously improve your own AI-assisted development tooling and raise the team's throughput
• Perform additional engineering duties as assigned

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• 5+ years building production systems that ran unattended and carried real consequences when they failed
• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field required;
  Master’s degree preferred
• Practical experience shipping scheduling, planning, or optimization systems
• Fluency in Python, C#, Java, Go, or Rust
• Disciplined engineering practices: testing, CI, observability, and simulation-first development
• Willingness to work and travel in MT and WA spend real time on the…