Duckdb Engineer Jobs in Raleigh, NC (NOW HIRING)

Senior Software Engineer - Edge Platform
A client of ours is an Animal AgTech company building automated, data-driven systems that improve animal welfare, productivity, and profitability across the poultry, livestock, and aquaculture industries is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join its Edge team. Their automated systems replace manual, inefficient processes in animal protein production with high-throughput machines deployed in hatcheries and processing facilities around the world.
In this role, you'll design, build, and operate the distributed edge-to-cloud pipeline that runs on IoT devices on the production floor - ingesting high-rate sensor and controller data and reliably forwarding it to the cloud over intermittent connectivity. This is a hands-on, backend-focused role spanning containerized .NET services, relational and document data stores, pub/sub messaging, and industrial protocol integration. You'll own features end-to-end and collaborate closely with Controls, HMI, Manufacturing, and Field Support to ship reliable, production-grade systems.
What You Will Be Doing

• 35% - Backend Service Development: Design and implement backend services in C# on modern .NET / ASP.NET Core for the edge platform - REST APIs, background workers, message handlers, telemetry aggregators, and long-running device services.
• 30% - Data Pipeline Ownership: Own the pipeline from device ingest to cloud archive - schema design, data-access layer, database migrations, partitioning and retention strategy, and durable store-and-forward upload to cloud object storage.
• 15% - Containerization & Deployment: Build and maintain containerized services and their deployment manifests, configuration, and orchestration.
• 10% - Industrial Integration: Integrate with industrial controllers over standard fieldbus and communication protocols - designing message contracts, register maps, warning/error codes, and controls-side handshakes for coordinated operation.
• 10% - Architecture & Mentorship: Contribute to architecture docs and refactors that keep the codebase maintainable; raise the bar in code review, pair with junior engineers, and coordinate cross-functionally to ship releases.

Platform Environment

• Languages: C# / modern .NET / ASP.NET Core (Python strongly preferred for tooling and test automation)
• Data: Relational and document stores, raw SQL, migrations, partitioning
• Infrastructure: Containerization, Linux (systemd, networking, shell scripting)
• CI/CD: Azure DevOps Pipelines, GitHub Actions, or similar
• Industrial Protocols: EtherCAT, MODBUS, OPC UA, PROFINET, EtherNet/IP, PLC integration
• Cloud: Azure (Blob Storage, IoT Hub, Container Registry, Managed Identity); AWS or Google Cloud Platform welcome
• Orchestration: Kubernetes, K3s/MicroK8s at the edge (a plus)

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience shipping production systems, with at least 1 year in a senior or technical-lead capacity
• Strong professional experience with C# and modern .NET - ASP.NET Core REST APIs, hosted/background services, and worker services
• Solid database engineering: relational schema design, indexing, migrations, and query tuning; comfort writing and reviewing raw SQL
• Practical experience with containerization
• Comfort with Linux as a deployment target (systemd services, log management, networking, device troubleshooting) and shell scripting
• Proficiency with Git, pull-request workflows, and CI/CD, including running unit and integration tests in the pipeline
• Strong grounding in software engineering fundamentals: automated testing, code review, refactoring, API design, and clear technical documentation
• Demonstrated experience delivering distributed backend systems in production, ideally at the edge or in an IoT/industrial context

Nice to Have

• Working knowledge of Python for tooling, data analysis, and test automation (pytest)
• Experience integrating with industrial control systems via fieldbus or SCADA protocols, or interoperating with PLCs
• Azure cloud services (Blob Storage, IoT Hub, Container Registry, Managed Identity, Azure DevOps)
• Kubernetes for orchestrating containerized workloads (deployments, services, Helm charts); K3s or MicroK8s at the edge
• IoT device software experience - long-lived services on embedded/ARM64 hardware, remote deployment, fleet management, safe OTA updates
• Familiarity with columnar/analytics formats (Parquet) and analytics engines (Fabric, Synapse, Databricks, DuckDB)
• Familiarity with visualization/dashboard tools (Grafana) and time-series data modeling

Working Conditions
Work is performed in a flex-space building with offices, open desk space, a laboratory, machine shop, and a manufacturing floor. Office areas are quiet and temperature-controlled; warehouse spaces have elevated noise and variable temperatures. Travel may be required - roughly 2-8 trips per year to visit suppliers, attend conferences and meetings, and visit customer sites (hatcheries).
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