[Hiring] Principal Software Engineer @Satomic

Role Description

This is Satomic's first software engineering hire. You will be building on an early foundation of existing tooling and a well-defined process map, with broad greenfield scope to design and own the systems that translate molecule requests into instrument-executable reaction plans. This is a first-of-its-kind application in chemistry, but the underlying problems will be familiar to engineers who have built control planes or other high-reliability systems coordinating heterogeneous infrastructure.

You will own long-running, stateful systems that must operate under real-world constraints: limited inventory, instrument scheduling conflicts, and more. The decisions you make here directly determine whether Satomic can deliver on its promise to customers.

You will partner closely with chemistry, automation, and data colleagues as a technical peer, translating real-world scientific and operational requirements into software systems. This role prioritizes building correct, working systems first, then evolving them toward scale as real usage emerges.

• Expected Outcomes:
• By day 30, you will have:
• Worked directly with the founders to identify the key unresolved software design decisions required before the system can run in production.
• Made explicit prioritization decisions on what to build, what to defer, and why — writing them down clearly so they can be shared, debated, and built on.
• Shipped your first tightly scoped, operator-facing feature in the existing system that research operations currently use, without introducing major architectural changes.
• By day 90, you will have:
• Defined and written the execution architecture for workflow orchestration and state management– covering systems boundaries, ownership of state, and explicit failure and retry behavior– and aligned the team on priorities and sequencing.
• Delivered an MVP execution pipeline that runs a molecule request end-to-end from order through planning and laboratory execution, implementing the defined execution model with correct state transitions, failure handling, and retry behavior demonstrated on at least one real molecule delivery workflow.
• Established and documented engineering standards in active use across the platform, covering testing strategy, error handling, retries, and observability.
• Instrumented the execution pipeline so failures are automatically detected, can be debugged from system state, and any workflow can be safely restarted without loss of work, demonstrated on at least one molecule delivery workflow.
• Established this execution pipeline as the source of truth for all molecule execution.
• By year 1, you will have:
• Built a stable, extensible execution platform that supports multiple concurrent customer synthesis programs running reliably in production.
• Defined platform abstractions that allow new reaction types, assets, or constraints to be added through extension rather than core rewrites, validated by at least one real example of this in practice.
• Established technical patterns and documentation clear enough that a new engineer will be productive on the platform within their first few weeks and materially raise the bar of the team.
• Defined a strong technical screen within our hiring process to efficiently and repeatably identify high-signal candidates who will make exceptional contributions to Satomic.
• Enabled execution volume to scale with customer demand without proportional increases in operational overhead or engineering intervention.
• By year 5, you will have:
• Built Satomic's execution platform into a core competitive advantage, enabling synthesis at speeds, throughput, and reliability unachievable without automation-first software.
• Built and scaled a team that consistently hires exceptional engineers who raise the bar on the culture, speed, and quality with which we build, establishing Satomic as the consensus destination for engineers who want to use software to manipulate atoms and improve human health.
• Actively stewarded the platform through multiple generations of scale while maintaining correctness, reliability, and developer velocity, without accumulating architectural debt that slows execution.
• Become the organizational reference point for how Satomic approaches hard technical problems, tradeoffs, and long-horizon platform decisions.

Qualifications

• Experience building systems from the ground up at an early-stage or high-growth company, making decisions with incomplete information.
• Experience designing and operating long-running or asynchronous systems where failures are expected and recovery is part of the design.
• Strong judgment in making architectural tradeoffs, including knowing what to defer and being able to defend those decisions clearly.
• Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) in a production environment, including compute, storage, networking, and managed services, with comfort making cost and reliability tradeoffs.
• Experience building or owning web interfaces, including familiarity with modern frontend frameworks (React, Vue, or similar) and the ability to make pragmatic frontend architecture decisions.
• Experience designing or maintaining CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows, including staging environments, rollback strategies, and release automation.
• Comfort choosing and modeling data storage solutions— relational, document, time-series, or otherwise— appropriate to the workload.
• Experience setting up and maintaining logging, metrics, and alerting to understand and respond to system health in production.
• Security-conscious design for systems handling sensitive or proprietary data, including practical experience with access controls, secrets management, and reducing attack surface.
• Experience with incident response and on-call ownership, including triage under pressure, structured post-mortems, and building systems that are debuggable by design.
• Ability to collaborate with non-software domain experts to translate ambiguous business or scientific requirements into well-scoped, sequenced technical plans.
• Python experience strongly preferred.

Overview of Satomic’s Interview Process

• Phone screen (15 minutes): A brief introductory call to discuss the role and answer questions.
• Technical screen (45 minutes): A discussion with a technical advisor to assess technical skills and experience.
• Take-home assignment: A scoped engineering problem representative of the work at Satomic, completed on your own time.
• Final round: A technical review of your take-home submission, followed by conversations with Satomic's leadership team focused on how you work, how you think, and how you collaborate across disciplines.

Diversity & Inclusion

We know there’s a serious lack of diversity in our industry, and that needs to change. At Satomic, we’re committed to helping drive that change. Our culture is built on inclusion, humility, humanity, and ingenuity — values that guide how we work with one another and how we approach the challenges of scaling science. We believe that bringing together people with diverse perspectives, experiences, and ways of thinking is not just the right thing to do, but makes us stronger: we want every member of our team to feel they belong and can do the best work of their career here.

Our mission is to close the gap from idea to molecule. That mission carries responsibility: the chemistry we enable can accelerate access to life-changing medicines and technologies, but it can also pose risks if used carelessly. We’re not agnostic to how our platform is applied—we care deeply about ensuring it is used for good. Building a team of diverse and thoughtful voices gives us the best chance of delivering a platform that not only advances the future of chemistry and drug discovery, but does so responsibly and with lasting positive impact on our world.