Specter
Software Engineer - Systems
San Francisco
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 292 days ago
C++Full-Stack DevelopmentAlgorithmsLinuxMachine LearningAgentic AISystems EngineeringRoboticsSensorsCollaboration
About the role
- Specter is hiring a Software Systems Engineer to build the real-time device software at the heart of our platform - spanning sensor integration, video pipelines, low-latency networking, and the infrastructure that ties it all together.
- This role owns the full stack from hardware interface to cloud edge, working closely with ML, perception, and platform teams to ship the performant, reliable systems that power autonomous monitoring across our customers' physical environments.
Responsibilities
- Design and build low-latency networking infrastructure connecting embedded devices and cloud systems - protocol design, congestion handling, and tuning for throughput and reliability across a distributed sensor network
- Build resource-efficient pipelines to ingest and egress multimodal sensor data and telemetry, handling packetization, buffering, and backpressure across constrained device environments
- Own low-latency command and control infrastructure across a distributed sensor network, with a focus on fault tolerance, deterministic timing, and graceful degradation
- Build and optimize video and image processing pipelines end-to-end: capture, hardware-accelerated encode/decode, streaming, and storage
- Build and maintain CI pipelines, test harnesses, and reliability tooling - the simulators and replay systems that let the team move fast without breaking things in the field
- Instrument, profile and benchmark system performance - CPU/GPU utilization, memory pressure, network throughput and latency - and drive systematic improvements
Requirements
- Broad systems experience across the areas below, with demonstrable depth in at least one - whether that's networking, video/sensor pipelines, or low-level Linux systems work
- Proficiency with concurrency and parallel programming - lock-free structures, async runtimes, thread management - with a track record of shipping correct, performant, concurrent code
- Deep networking knowledge (UDP, TCP, QUIC) beyond the API level - packet loss, flow control, retransmission, and tuning for real-world conditions; strong Linux systems fundamentals including IPC, scheduling, and memory management
- Hands-on hardware integration experience - cameras, IMUs, or other sensors - including driver interfaces, kernel boundaries, and video pipelines (capture, encode/decode, streaming via V4L2, GStreamer, FFmpeg, or similar)
- Comfortable owning CI infrastructure, test harnesses, benchmarking pipelines, and observability tooling alongside feature work
Nice to have
- Hands-on experience with modern video codec implementations (H.264, H.265, AV1) across hardware platforms - encoder tuning, rate control, and platform-specific acceleration (V4L2, NVENC, etc.)
- Robotics, perception, or state estimation background - familiarity with sensor fusion, localization, tracking algorithms
- Experience writing Rust and Nix
- Experience working alongside real-time, multimodal ML data ingestion systems - understanding the data quality, latency, and throughput requirements that make or break model performance
- Production Rust (preferred) or C++ in low-latency, embedded, or systems contexts - with real ownership of performance, reliability, and resource constraints
Skills
- Company Background
- Specter's mission is to help automate the physical world.
Apply directly at Specter →Create a free account for alerts like thisView Specter immigration profile
This listing is sourced directly from Specter's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.