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Lead Edge Engineer at Queue in HQ - Newark, CA
Job Description
About Us
Queue builds robots to fill prescriptions. Our machine is designed to take stock bottles of medication and produce counted, labeled vials, so that pharmacists and technicians can spend their time on patients. Our first product is built to work behind the pharmacy counter and to be operated by pharmacy staff.
About the Role
We are building out the Edge squad: the engineers who write the software that runs on our machine and tells its hardware what to do. You are a hands-on technical lead. You own the edge software end to end, from design and code to release and behavior in the field, and you raise the bar for everyone who builds it. You build to one rule and hold the squad to it: when the machine cannot confirm a step, it stops safely and says why.
This is a lead-level role: a staff engineer's technical bar, plus delivery through a team. It is hands-on, and it is not a people-management role.
What You'll Own
Design and code — The design of the edge software and the code that carries it, from the links to the boards to the state machines that sequence each fill. You stay in the code and review the squad's.
Contracts at the boundaries — The contracts with the microcontrollers and the vision service. You design and version them so that old and new versions work together through a release.
Releases and field behavior — How a release of the edge software is built, tested and shipped, what the software reports from the field, and how it is diagnosed from a distance. You work on updates with the platform and systems reliability engineers, and on the image with the engineers who own it.
The seams — Where the edge software meets firmware, vision, the cloud and the image. A fault that falls between two squads is yours until it is fixed, and you fix it with the squad on the other side.
The squad's bar — What you accept in review becomes the standard, so you define it crisply, hold it every time and measure quality against it. You grow the engineers around you into leaders: you pair and coach, give them the lead and back them, and you interview the ones who join.
Decisions in writing — You write decisions down with the options you weighed and why, and share them early for challenge across the squads, so engineers can make the next decision without you.
Fail-closed behavior — The rule on every path the squad owns: when the machine cannot confirm a step, it stops safely and says why. You design the failure path first, and the squad does too.
What stays with others, so that you know where your work stops: the operating-system image stays with the engineers who own it, the cloud with the platform engineers, and the call that a release is ready with software leadership.
First 90 Days
Day 30: You have built the edge software, run it on a bench and merged changes through review. With the firmware, vision and platform engineers, you have traced a fill across every seam, and you can name each point where it has to stop if a step cannot be confirmed.
Day 60: You own one seam end to end with the squad on the other side: its code, its contract and what the edge software does when the other side fails. You have planned the squad's next release with its engineers, each change with an owner, and written down the bar you hold in review.
Day 90: You have scoped and reviewed a change that an engineer on the squad has taken through release to machines on the bench, with its failure paths tested first. You have written down the reasons behind one design decision, so that engineers can act on it without you, and the squad reviews to what you wrote down.
What We're Looking For
Must-Have
Ownership — you have written production C, C++ or Rust on Linux and owned a device's software end to end, from the first design to the fault found in the field, including faults that started in another team's part of the system.
Hardware integration over buses — CAN, RS-485 and other serial links, USB. You debug at the wire when the logs and the hardware disagree.
Real-time orchestration and state machines — you have designed the sequencing of motion, sensing and I/O where partial failure is normal, and you design the failure path first: when a step cannot be confirmed, the system stops safely and says why.
MCU boundary literacy — you understand how a microcontroller runs and what it exposes to a Linux host, and you have designed versioned device protocols with firmware that held up through change, for example a protobuf schema, a CAN message set or a register map.
Embedded Linux integration — you have done substantial work getting software running well on an embedded Linux system: its services, devices, start-up, configuration and updates, worked out with the owners of its image.
Connected device fleets — you have run devices in the field: updates, remote diagnostics, telemetry, and the recovery of a unit you cannot touch.
Hardened device platforms — you have shipped software on devices with verified start-up, signed updates and a read-only system, and you design software that works within them.
Technical leadership — you have made a team's engineering better through design, review and mentoring, without needing a title. You ask for challenge on your own designs, change course when the evidence says so, and say early, with data, when a commitment will slip. When several things go wrong at once, you put them in order and finish one before you start the next.
The edge software is written in Rust, and you will work in it every day. Rust in production is strongly preferred.
Nice-to-Have
Industrial x86 and ARM platforms in a shipped product.
Full ownership of an embedded Linux distribution: building and maintaining the image of a shipped device, from what goes into it to how it updates.
Kernel and board bring-up: drivers, device trees and boot on a new board.
NVIDIA Jetson: JetPack and Linux for Tegra, secure boot, field updates and the inference stack.
Robotics, medical devices, automotive or industrial automation.
How We Hire
Recruiter Screen (30 min)
Technical Interview (90 min) — a take-home exercise of 2 to 3 hours, in C, C++ or Rust, sent at least 24 hours before: a small piece of device software built around a state machine, which has to stay correct when power is lost at any step. We go through it together, then build on it.
Design Interview (60 min) — the path a new version of the software takes to a fleet of machines, with the failure cases in from the start, and where the edge software's decisions stop and another squad's begin.
Leadership Interview (60 min) — how you lead through a team.
Two interviewers score each technical stage independently.
What We Offer
Ownership — the edge software end to end, from design to the field
Hard problems: real-time sequencing across boards, the seams with firmware, vision and the cloud, and machines in the field you cannot touch
Small team, zero bureaucracy, high trust
Why Join Us Now?
Impact & Growth
Direct Impact: Your design decisions are the ones every change to the edge software builds on
Growth: The work runs from one change on the bench to how the software behaves on every machine in the field
Team and Culture
Reports to the Head of Software Engineering with significant autonomy and influence
Who You Work With: You work every day with the engineers who build the edge software, and with the firmware, vision, platform and systems reliability squads at its seams
Where We Work: On site at our headquarters in the Bay Area; this work needs the hardware in front of you
Our Values
Servant Leadership
Do the Hard Things
Own Your Work
Default is Now
Servant Leadership comes first in this role: you make the engineers around you better, and the squads you depend on more successful.
Contact: If you have any questions, please contact us at careers@queue.inc