Software Engineer, AI Engineer

Overview

Onto Innovation is a leader in process control, combining global scale with an expanded portfolio of leading‑edge technologies that include 3D metrology, macro defect inspection, metal interconnect composition, factory analytics, and advanced lithography for semiconductor packaging. Our breadth across the full value chain helps customers solve yield, device performance, quality, and reliability challenges and optimizes their critical progress path by making them smarter, faster, and more efficient.

As a Software Engineer in the Inspection Business Unit (IBU), you will develop advanced inspection platforms used in semiconductor manufacturing. This role is ideal for early‑career engineers who are excited to work on complex, real‑world systems that tightly integrate optics, mechanics, electronics, and software.

Success in this role requires the ability to develop and maintain a clear system‑level mental model of a sophisticated inspection platform, and to move fluidly between high‑level architecture and detailed technical investigation when problems arise.

0–5 Years

Early‑career engineers will focus on foundational development and system understanding, with opportunities to grow into broader technical ownership.

• Build and continuously refine an understanding of the full inspection platform, including optics, motion systems, electronics, image acquisition, and the software stack.
• Translate customer issues and application requirements into well‑defined engineering tasks by reasoning across subsystem boundaries.
• Move effectively between system‑level architecture and detailed technical areas such as algorithms, data flow, performance, hardware interfaces, GPUs, databases, and UX.
• Participate in New Product Development (NPD) alongside hardware, applications, and systems engineers, as well as technical project and product management partners.

• Develop and integrate software based on product and customer requirements using industry best practices, image processing, computer vision, and mathematics.
• Write, test, debug, and maintain production software focused on reliability, performance, and scalability.
• Participate in requirements analysis, software design, implementation, and test planning.
• Engage in design and code reviews with software and systems engineering peers.
• Use AI coding agents to accelerate implementation while maintaining ownership of design decisions, architecture, and code quality.

• Stay current with academic and industry developments in machine vision inspection, image processing, and AI‑assisted software development.
• Document software designs, system‑level reasoning, and troubleshooting approaches.
• Collaborate closely with teammates across disciplines; at more experienced levels, contribute to improvements in development workflows, tooling, and engineering practices, including responsible use of AI‑assisted tools.

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field.
• 0–5 years of relevant experience (including internships, co‑ops, or research).
• Demonstrated ability to reason about systems at multiple levels of abstraction—from high‑level architecture to implementation details.
• Strong analytical, problem‑solving, and communication skills.
• Experience or coursework in at least one compiled or production language such as C/C++, C#, or Java.
• Familiarity with AI coding tools (e.g., Copilot).
• Familiarity with Agile development practices and modern version control workflows.

• Exposure to semiconductor inspection, machine vision, robotics, or hardware‑software co‑designed systems.
• Experience diagnosing issues that span multiple subsystems (optics, electronics, firmware, application software).
• Familiarity with embedded systems, hardware communication protocols, and/or real‑time constraints.
• Experience or coursework in a numerically focused environment such as Python or MATLAB, including linear algebra, image processing, and…