Software Engineer

About Radical AI Radical AI is replacing an R&D process that currently takes 10+ years and $100 million to produce a single discovery. Our self-driving lab platform combines AI with autonomous robotics to run experiments, analyze results, and iterate—continuously, without human bottlenecks. For industries like aerospace, automotive, defense, energy, manufacturing, semiconductors, and space, that means breakthroughs in weeks instead of years. We're a small, senior team. Everyone here works close to the metal — real robots, real data, real production systems. The Role This is a generalist software engineering role on the team building the core platform that powers our autonomous lab. Depending on where you plug in, you might own backend services, agent tooling, data and orchestration pipelines, internal platforms, or the infrastructure that keeps our systems observable and reliable in production. What's non-negotiable: strong systems thinking, production instincts, and the ability to contribute across the stack. We're building software that controls and monitors physical systems in the real world — the bar for correctness and reliability is high. We work across a deeply cross-disciplinary domain (robotics, ML, experimental automation), and one near-term priority involves hybrid cloud/on-prem deployments in customer environments. Engineers who've navigated those constraints will hit the ground running. What You'll Work On Lab backend: experiment definitions, sample path-planning, long running durable task executionData backend: database schemas, migrations, ETL pipelines, object storage + partition designInternal platforms: developer tooling, SDKs, shared services, service templatesObservability and reliability: structured logs, metrics, tracing, production debugging (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana)Hybrid infrastructure: cloud + on-prem, containerization, orchestration, infrastructure-as-codeAgent capabilities and tooling: API integrations, code execution, scientific literature retrieval, workflow automationScientific workflow orchestration: Bayesian optimization loops, experiment scheduling, long-running job execution, retries, idempotencyData pipelines for ingesting, transforming, and serving data to models and LLMs What We're Looking For Required: 5-6+ years of production software engineering experience; strong enough to design, build, and ship end-to-endFluency in Go and/or Python; additional stack experience (TypeScript, Rust) is welcomeDeep comfort with distributed systems: timeouts, retries, idempotency, partial failure, dead-letter queues, safe rollbackExperience with concurrent and asynchronous programming — event loops, cancellation semantics, bounded queues, task orchestration under failureSolid networking fundamentals (especially important for potential on-prem deployment contexts)Containerization and cloud deployment experience (Kubernetes, AWS); comfort debugging Linux systemsHigh ownership: you find problems before they find users and raise the bar for quality Nice to have: Experience with agentic systems or LLM workflows (tool-calling, context management, PydanticAI, LangChain)Experience with enterprise self-hosted storage solutions (Ceph/Rook, Longhorn, WEKA, VAST, TrueNAS)Ray framework experienceFamiliarity with MongoDB and gRPCCI/CD and DevSecOps experience (GitHub Actions, Gitlab Pipelines)Familiarity with embedded protocols (serial, I²C, Modbus), device virtualization, or microcontroller firmwareStrong observability experience (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, distributed tracing)Frontend experience (TypeScript/Svelte/React) — real-time interfaces, state management, structured APIsBackground in robotics, automation, or manufacturing infrastructure Work Arrangement This role is based in our New York City lab. Compensation $210,000 - $265,000 base + equity + benefits Base pay may vary depending on experience and skills. We offer 100% employer-covered medical, dental, and vision insurance, unlimited PTO, 14+ company holidays, 401(k), and mental health support. Radical AI is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, marital status, disability, or veteran status.