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Senior Software Engineer - Connected Devices

Full-Time Position | Portland, Oregon

About Us

Rapta is revolutionizing precision US manufacturing with an agentic native AI Platform trusted by the nation's top defense primes. Backed by top investors and growing 521% year-over-year, we're a Portland-based team building computer vision and robotics technology that keeps America's most critical production lines running flawlessly. If you want to do meaningful work at the intersection of AI and advanced manufacturing, we'd love to meet you.

Position Overview

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer who writes production software for hardware. You'll own the software layer that connects Rapta's AI platform to the physical world - industrial cameras, smart tools, motion stages, and edge GPUs deployed on real factory floors. This is a software engineering role first; the differentiator is that you're fluent in the protocols, timing constraints, and failure modes of industrial hardware, and you write clean, testable code that talks to it reliably.

You'll work directly with the CTO and partner closely with our Feature Engineering and Platform teams to build the hardware abstraction layer that the rest of the product depends on.

What You'll Do

• Design and build the software interfaces between Rapta's AI platform and industrial hardware - cameras, smart wrenches, motion stages, and edge compute

• Implement and maintain device drivers and integration libraries for industrial protocols: Modbus TCP, Open Protocol, OPC-UA, GigE Vision, USB3 Vision, RS-232/485, CAN

• Define clean, versioned hardware abstraction APIs (gRPC/protobuf, contract-first) that decouple application code from device specifics

• Own peripheral integration end-to-end: vendor SDK evaluation, driver implementation, error handling, observability, and field debugging

• Write the software that brings up new hardware in the lab and qualifies it for deployment - calibration routines, self-test, diagnostics, telemetry

• Build and maintain hardware-in-the-loop test infrastructure so device integrations have real test coverage

• Debug across the full stack when things go wrong on a customer floor - from Python application code through gRPC, through the protocol layer, down to a misbehaving device

What We're Looking For

• 10+ years writing production software, with significant time spent on systems that talk to hardware

• Strong software engineering fundamentals: you write clean, tested, maintainable code and care about API design

• Deep familiarity with at least two or three major industrial protocols and significant experience with real time protocol analyzers and debugging from first principals

• Comfortable in a factory, a lab, and a terminal - often in the same day

• Pragmatic about the line between "what the hardware can do" and "what the software should expose"

Required Technical Skills

• Expert-level Python; strong fluency in at least one of C#, C++ or Go, for performance-critical or driver-adjacent work

• Hands-on experience implementing Modbus TCP/RTU clients and servers in production code

• Experience integrating industrial smart tools via protocols like Open Protocol (Atlas Copco/Desoutter), Kolver, or equivalent vendor protocols

• Working knowledge of OPC-UA, GigE Vision, USB3 Vision, RS-232/485, and CAN - you don't need all of them, but you should have shipped code against several

• Experience with industrial camera SDKs (Basler/pypylon, FLIR Spinnaker, GenICam, or similar) including AOI/ROI, triggering, and lens control

• Strong Linux fundamentals - udev rules, systemd services, kernel module basics, USB and network device debugging

• gRPC/protobuf or equivalent contract-first API design experience

• Infrastructure-as-code fluency: Ansible or equivalent for repeatable provisioning of hardware-attached systems

• Comfort writing integration tests, hardware-in-the-loop tests, and diagnostic tooling

Highly Competitive Candidates Will Also Bring

• Experience deploying software in DOD, defense industrial base, or CMMC-regulated environments

• Familiarity with edge computing constraints - air-gapped networks, deterministic startup, thermal and power limits

• Bazel monorepo experience

• Familiarity with manufacturing quality standards (ISO, Six Sigma, IPC)

Why Join Us?

• Foundational role building the hardware integration layer at a high-growth AI company

• Meaningful early-stage equity at a late seed-stage company

• Competitive compensation and benefits package

Location Requirements

This position requires full time, 5 days per week in-office presence at our Portland headquarters. Candidates must be local to the Portland, Oregon metro area or willing to relocate at their expense prior to start. Remote-only applicants need not apply.