Merge Labs is a frontier research lab working to bridge biological and artificial intelligence. It is developing new approaches to brain-computer interfaces that interact with the brain at high bandwidth, integrate with advanced AI, and are intended to be safe and accessible.

About the team

The Core Software team builds the software backbone behind Merge Labs' science, designing and maintaining the infrastructure that moves experimental data from instrument to insight. Its users are biologists, clinicians, neuroscientists and ML researchers.

About the role

This role owns the software that turns Merge's custom-built instruments into something engineers and scientists can build robust protocols on top of, through clean and coherent APIs. The first screening platform acquires simultaneous ultrasound and microscopy readouts, requires nanosecond-scale TTL-based control, and provides real-time feedback to custom environment controllers, a custom stage and custom consumables.

What you will do

• Wrap heterogeneous instruments, including ultrasound-on-chip, cameras, stages, temperature control and delay generators, as reusable, well-tested building blocks behind a coherent device abstraction.
• Design and build the orchestration layer shared across experimental platforms, standardizing trigger management, checkpoint coordination and safe experiment orchestration.
• Build in safety by default through parameter bounds, interlocks and dry-run simulation, so protocols run identically every time.
• Work with the data platform team on streaming and backpressure management so terabyte-per-second acquisition does not fail mid-experiment.
• Onboard the platform engineers who build scientist-facing protocols, and advise on integration needs for new hardware purchases.
• Mentor scientists and engineers on software practice and the development lifecycle.

You might thrive here if you have

• A love of deep systems engineering: real-time device control, concurrency, memory and performance.
• Experience building hardware or instrument integrations for a team rather than just yourself.
• Excellent API and SDK design taste, with clean abstractions, good defaults and elegant handling of async and large data.
• Empathy for non-technical users building workflows on top of the measurement platform.
• Bonus: scientific instrumentation experience in ultrasound or microscopy, lab automation, or high-throughput data acquisition.