Senior Software Engineer - API Platform

About the Role

Key Responsibilities

• Provide hands-on technical leadership to a high-impact API Platform team.
• Mentor and coach junior engineers, encouraging continuous learning and development.
• Promote engineering best practices, quality, and a culture of technical excellence.
• Contribute to the architecture of scalable, versioned REST and gRPC APIs in Go.
• Design intuitive and maintainable API contracts that expose real-time robot capabilities and telemetry.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (robotics, infrastructure, product) to ensure cohesive system architecture and performance.
• Develop and maintain backend services and SDKs (initially in Go, Python, and TypeScript).
• Write efficient, reliable, and idiomatic code, following company coding standards.
• Translate low-level hardware commands into clean, high-level API interfaces.
• Own the full API lifecycle—from specification and development to production rollout and continuous improvement.
• Lead end-to-end delivery of critical platform services and developer tools.
• Define project goals, scope, and timelines, coordinating closely with cross-functional partners.
• Drive API adoption and iterate based on developer feedback and real-world telemetry.
• Influence API strategy, developer platform direction, and long-term service design.
• Stay current with emerging technologies, API trends, and developer experience improvements.
• Recommend tools, frameworks, and process enhancements to improve delivery velocity and code quality.
• Instrument and monitor production systems with metrics, logging, and distributed tracing.
• Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines, contract testing, and one-click deployments.
• Participate in on-call rotation to support service availability and performance.
• Debug and resolve complex software defects and production issues.
• Analyze root causes and contribute to robust, long-term solutions.
• Conduct post-mortems and contribute to continuous reliability improvements.
• Align stakeholders around pragmatic API contracts.
• Collaborate across teams to prioritize work and communicate progress.
• Write design documents, RFCs, and contribute to internal technical discussions.
• Establish and advocate for testing best practices and automation.
• Ensure backward compatibility, versioning strategies, and SDK ergonomics.
• Participate in and lead code reviews and design reviews.
• Write and maintain technical documentation including OpenAPI/Protobuf specs, developer guides, and tutorials.
• Share knowledge through lunch-and-learns, internal demos, and mentorship.
• Drive knowledge-sharing initiatives within the engineering organization.
• Performs other duties or takes on specialized responsibilities as assigned.

Requirements

• 5+ years of backend software engineering experience (or equivalent impact), with a strong focus on API design and distributed systems.
• Strong proficiency in Go or similar modern backend languages (e.g., Python, TypeScript, Java, C++).
• Deep understanding of networking, concurrency, performance tuning, and system architecture.
• Experience designing and deploying production-grade APIs (REST and/or gRPC), including versioning, idempotency, pagination, and contract enforcement.
• Proficiency with CI/CD systems, Docker/Kubernetes, cloud platforms, and infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform.
• Familiarity with observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, distributed tracing).
• Ability to lead complex technical projects independently and collaboratively.

Nice to Have

• Experience in developer platform work: creating SDKs, improving developer experience, writing tutorials/examples.
• Strong consumer of APIs; continuously learns and incorporates industry best practices.
• Experience using the Linux terminal and operating in Unix-based environments.
• Comfortable working in fast-moving, ambiguous environments with a bias for incremental delivery.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• Advanced degrees or equivalent experience in robotics-related or API-focused software development are a plus.