Principal Software Engineer
San Francisco
- Salary
- $268K - $279K
- Level
- Principal
- Work type
- On-site · San Francisco
Not stated in the posting: visa.
Open. First seen 22 October 2026.
About the role
What you’ll do
- Act as the technical lead for large parts of the scanner platform: system architecture, codebase structure, and long-term maintainability.
- Own core runtime foundations: distributed control, state management, fault handling, and reliability.
- Drive engineering rigor: testability, code quality, review standards, performance regression prevention, and release processes.
- Build robust observability: logs, metrics, traces, and replayable diagnostics (with privacy constraints).
- Collaborate with hardware and recon/ML teams to define interfaces, data contracts, timing/synchronization, and failure modes.
- Lead complex refactors (e.g., message passing / RPC boundaries, modularization, concurrency model) without halting forward progress.
What we’re looking for
- Deep software architecture experience for real-world systems: robotics, instrumentation, medical devices, or other complex distributed products.
- Strong Python and concurrency background (asyncio, multiprocessing, profiling, performance engineering).
- Track record of shipping systems that are observable, debuggable, and resilient.
- Strong technical leadership: clarity, pragmatic trade-offs, and mentoring.
Useful experience
- Building but rock-solid systems: clear interfaces (gRPC/protobuf or equivalent), strong state modeling, and failure handling.
- High-leverage engineering habits on a lean team: good tests, CI, reproducible dev environments, and fast code review.
- Practical performance + concurrency work in Python (asyncio, profiling, multiprocessing) and comfort debugging distributed behavior.
- Security-minded device software: safe defaults, encrypted data paths, and disciplined handling of PII/PHI.
- Operational thinking: remote updates/management, excellent logging, and diagnostics that make real hardware debuggable.
What this role asks for
Particular to this role
gRPC
Rare in Midjourney's other 14 open postings.
Standard for software engineering roles
Python
Common in software engineering postings at any company.
Compared with Midjourney's other open jobs.
The team: Midjourney Medical
This role is one of 8 open in Midjourney Medical.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
Python (3 of 8)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Physical Scientist / Test Engineer posted Sep 18
- Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Clinical Team) posted Sep 18
- Hardware Physicist posted Sep 7
- Senior Mechanical Engineer (Medical) posted Aug 24
- Principal Electrical Engineer (Design Lead) posted Jul 30
- Principal Machine Learning Engineer (Reconstruction / Quantitative Imaging) posted Jun 30
- Senior Cloud / Data Engineer (Data / Reconstruction / HIPAA) posted Jun 30
From the team and dates on Midjourney's own job board.
Salary context
49 other open postings titled Principal Software Engineer state a salary: median USD 200,000 to USD 250,000 a year.
See Software Engineer salaries in San Francisco →
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Also at this company
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