Software Engineer, Applications & Systems

Merge Labs is a frontier research lab with the mission of bridging biological and artificial intelligence to maximize human ability, agency and experience. We’re pursuing this goal by developing fundamentally new approaches to brain-computer interfaces that interact with the brain at high bandwidth, integrate with advanced AI, and are ultimately safe and accessible for anyone to use.

About Us

Merge Labs is a frontier research lab with the mission of bridging biological and artificial intelligence to maximize human ability, freedom and experience. We are pursuing this long-term goal by developing broadband brain-computer interfaces that interact with the brain at high bandwidth, integrate with advanced AI, and are ultimately safe and accessible enough for anyone to use.

About the Team

Our software engineers build the tools that let scientists and engineers run experiments, work with custom instruments and turn data into useful results. We work across applications, device software, data systems and infrastructure, with short feedback loops between the people building the tools and the people using them.

About the Role

We are looking for a generalist software engineer who enjoys building useful applications and following a problem into the rest of the stack. A significant part of your work will be building experimental applications and workflows in close partnership with our SDK engineer. You will turn instrument APIs into software that users can configure, run, understand and trust.

You will also contribute where the team needs implementation capacity: an API, data integration, a test harness, a deployment improvement or a performance issue. You will have clear project ownership and support from experienced engineers while developing breadth across our systems.

In this role, you will:

• Build applications and interactive tools for configuring experiments, monitoring execution, visualizing results and capturing metadata.

• Pair directly with the SDK engineer to integrate instrument capabilities and improve the interfaces that applications and scripts share.

• Keep reusable experiment logic separate from presentation code so workflows can support both interactive use and automation.

• Implement practical failure handling, cancellation, recovery, logging and testing.

• Connect application outputs to data services with clear metadata and version information.

• Contribute to backend services, data integration, developer tooling, CI, packaging and other parts of the stack as priorities require.

• Diagnose problems beyond the UI and work with specialists on performance, concurrency, native code or hardware interfaces.

• Work directly with scientists and engineers to understand a workflow, ship a useful first version and improve it through use.

• Own your changes through review, release, documentation and follow-up.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• Strong coding and debugging fundamentals and examples of software you completed and helped others use.

• Experience building applications, services or tools, with the curiosity to understand how the adjacent layers work.

• Comfort using APIs, writing tests and collaborating through version control and code review.

• A practical approach to learning unfamiliar systems and asking for help early.

• Care for clear user workflows, trustworthy data and understandable failure behavior.

• Interest in broad startup responsibilities alongside concrete, achievable project ownership.

Helpful, but not required:

• Scientific software, robotics, instrumentation, imaging or lab automation.

• Python, C++, Rust, desktop applications or interactive visualization.

• Asynchronous systems, data pipelines, offline deployment or hardware integration.

If you're excited about this role but don't meet every qualification, please apply. As we build, we're hiring for complementary strengths to form a high-impact team.

Merge Labs does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, family status, ancestry, citizenship, U.S. military (state and federal) and veteran status, or any other legally protected status. It is our intention that all applicants be given equal opportunity and that selection decisions are based on job related factors. We are an equal opportunity employer.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made by emailing View email address on jobs.ashbyhq.com.