Senior Application Engineer

Merge Labs is a frontier research lab with the mission of bridging biological and artificial intelligence to maximize human ability, agency and experience. We’re pursuing this goal by developing fundamentally new approaches to brain-computer interfaces that interact with the brain at high bandwidth, integrate with advanced AI, and are ultimately safe and accessible for anyone to use.

About the team

Merge’s Core Software team builds the software backbone that will make next-generation neuroscience possible. We design, implement, and maintain the infrastructure that moves experimental data from instrument to insight—reliably, reproducibly, and at scale. Our users are biologists, clinicians, neuroscientists, and ML researchers. Our mandate is simple: build safe and correct systems that let science move faster. We are bar-raisers and scientific partners, trusted to demonstrate the highest levels of software integrity, define the interfaces for both data collection and analysis, and democratize access to scientific data and computational infrastructure across the company.

About the role

As the founding application engineer on the team, you’ll help define and build out the core application that is used by scientists, clinicians, and collaborators to interface with our custom multi-modal hardware product. You’ll work closely with our hardware team to define what is possible, craft intuitive interfaces for clinicians and build efficient tools for our in-house scientists to use. This role reports to the Head of Software and is highly cross-functional. You will work closely with in-house data engineers to leverage our state-of-the-art data platform to provide low- and no-code interfaces for sophisticated laboratory workflows. Users will range from hardware engineers—requiring flexible, high-performance APIs—to external research partners, who will require carefully designed safeguards and a simple, intuitive interface. Meticulous attention to detail and a passion for creating safe software will be essential, as every user interaction must reflect the highest standards of ethical and safe scientific practice.

In this role, you will:

• Write software that allows scientists to create custom 3+1D treatment plans combining functional ultrasound imaging with targeted ultrasound-based neuromodulation.

• Incorporate ultrasound, microscopy, gantry, and other automation-related APIs into an integrated application that can be used to run both one-off experiments and high-throughput screens.

• Provide interactive interfaces for manual labeling of 3+1D data, and work with dedicated data engineers to ensure that the outputs from scientist labeling efforts are trivially accessible to our machine learning team(s).

• Lead efforts to ensure a smooth online and offline user experience to allow external collaborators to perform analyses even in air-gapped clinical environments, while still retaining and synchronizing results safely once the device is back online.

• Own monitoring/observability efforts for both online and offline users of our core BCI application.

• Work with a talented infrastructure team to fully automate deployment of all applications, using CI/CD and best practices for desktop applications that must often be deployed in air-gapped environments.

• Define application APIs that make it possible for non-UI-experts to “self-service” simple scientist-facing UIs, and lead efforts to maintain a high quality standard among GUI applications written by other developers on the team.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 5–10+ years of experience building interactive interfaces for scientists, clinicians, or similar non-web-based users.

• Passion for creating safe, intuitive interfaces to enable diverse users to access novel BCI

• Strong software fundamentals in Python, SQL, and experience deploying desktop applications.

• Proven ability to partner with non-technical users to understand needs and ship usable systems.

• Comfort owning systems end-to-end – from design and implementation to deployment and monitoring.

• Background in computational biology, microscopy, ultrasound, or other scientific data systems is preferred.

If you're excited about this role but don't meet every qualification, please apply. As we build, we're hiring for complementary strengths to form a high-impact team.
Merge Labs does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, family status, ancestry, citizenship, U.S. military (state and federal) and veteran status, or any other legally protected status. It is our intention that all applicants be given equal opportunity and that selection decisions are based on job related factors. We are an equal opportunity employer.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made by emailing [email protected].