Software Engineer

Caltech is a world-renowned science and engineering institute that marshals some of the world's brightest minds and most innovative tools to address fundamental scientific questions. We thrive on finding and cultivating talented people who are passionate about what they do. Join us and be a part of the diverse Caltech community.

Job Summary

Caltech has been awarded funding under the National Science Foundation's Programmable Cloud Laboratories (PCL) Test Bed program to establish ELECTRA, a remotely accessible, AI-enabled automated laboratory for electron diffraction (MicroED) and structural elucidation. ELECTRA is one node in a nationwide network of 20 PCL Test Bed facilities that will let researchers anywhere, including at institutions with limited access to advanced instrumentation, submit and run real experiments over the cloud. We are hiring the founding team that will help build and operate the Caltech node. Our cross-disciplinary team is composed of scientists and engineers from academia and the private sector. This project will directly impact various scientific fields, including chemistry, biology, and materials science, with applications in tech and medicine.

As Software Engineer, you will help build the platform that lets remote users specify, submit, schedule, and monitor real experiments on ELECTRA's instruments: the core software layer that turns a laboratory into a cloud-accessible facility. You will also assist in the building of an open-access data repository for training scientific AI models.

Read more:

https://www.nsf.gov/tip/updates/nsf-announces-400m-investment-new-national-network-ai

https://pasadenanow.com/main/a-17-million-bet-on-automation-caltech-team-builds-cloud-lab-to-decode-unknown-molecules

Essential Job Duties

• Design and build the API, user interface, and orchestration/scheduling layer that let users specify, submit, schedule, and monitor experiments, coordinating instrument control and data collection into reliable end-to-end workflows.
• Integrate commercial and custom instrument hardware and software, including device drivers and abstraction layers over low-level communication protocols (e.g., RS-232, USB, TCP/IP, OPC-UA, SiLA2), securing vendor programming interface access where it is not publicly documented.
• Build data pipelines that capture raw data, provenance, and metadata for every experiment, with traceability from request to result and shared schemas for interoperability with other PCL nodes.
• Own authentication, access control, logging, and monitoring for a remotely accessed facility, and build fault tolerance, automated tests, and simulation environments so the platform and its drivers can be validated reliably.
• Provide field support and troubleshooting for remote users encountering instrument, connectivity, or data-pipeline errors.
• Collaborate with the team to translate experimental requirements into durable software, contribute to documentation and onboarding materials, and mentor students and junior engineers.

Basic Qualifications

• B.S. or M.S. in computer science, software or electrical engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years building production software with demonstrated ownership of complex systems end-to-end.
• Experience designing and operating APIs or services with real users and uptime expectations.
• Experience controlling instruments, robotics, or physical systems in software, or equivalent device-integration or distributed-systems experience.
• Proficiency in Python and experience with front-end web development (JavaScript/TypeScript) or a compiled language for driver work (C/C++).
• Ability to work embedded in a laboratory alongside scientists.
• Strong collaboration and written communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Laboratory automation, instrument orchestration, device driver development, or LIMS/ELN experience.
• Scheduling and optimization (constraint programming, MILP, heuristics).
• Scientific data formats, metadata standards, or relational database and data warehousing experience.
• Electron microscopy, crystallography, or imaging data.
• Agentic systems, LLM-backed applications, or tool-use frameworks.
• Cloud infrastructure and front-end experience for user-facing portals and dashboards, or prior work in academic or national laboratory research computing.

Required Documents

• Resume
• Cover Letter