Specter
Software Engineer - Systems
San Francisco. Posted 13 months ago
The role
This person will build real-time device software spanning sensor integration, video pipelines, and low-latency networking. They will work from hardware interface to cloud edge to power autonomous monitoring.
What you will do
- Design and build low-latency networking infrastructure connecting embedded devices and cloud systems
- Build resource-efficient pipelines to ingest and egress multimodal sensor data and telemetry
- Own low-latency command and control infrastructure across a distributed sensor network
- Integrate and fuse multimodal data streams from cameras, IMUs, and other sensors
- Build and optimize video and image processing pipelines end-to-end
- Contribute to tracking and state estimation algorithms
- Build and maintain CI pipelines, test harnesses, and reliability tooling
- Instrument, profile and benchmark system performance
Required qualifications
- Broad systems experience across networking, video/sensor pipelines, or low-level Linux systems work
- C++ in low-latency, embedded, or systems contexts
- Deep networking knowledge (UDP, TCP, QUIC) including packet loss, flow control, retransmission, and tuning
- Strong Linux systems fundamentals including IPC, scheduling, and memory management
- Hands-on hardware integration experience including driver interfaces, kernel boundaries, and video pipelines
- Proficiency with concurrency and parallel programming including lock-free structures, async runtimes, and thread management
- Comfortable owning CI infrastructure, test harnesses, benchmarking pipelines, and observability tooling
Nice to have
- Production Rust
- Experience working alongside real-time, multimodal ML data ingestion systems
- Hands-on experience with modern video codec implementations (H.264, H.265, AV1)
- Robotics, perception, or state estimation background
- Experience writing Rust and Nix
About the company
Specter's mission is to help automate the physical world. They build video sensors with state-of-the-art AI agents that detect and reason about physical activity.