Software Engineer - Full Stack at Specter in San Francisco, CA

Company BackgroundSpecter's mission is to help automate the physical world.

Today, we build video sensors with state-of-the-art AI agents that answer any question, anywhere in their environments. Our systems can automatically detect and reason about any physical activity captured on camera, from security incidents (e.g. perimeter intrusion, theft, LPR), to safety monitoring (e.g. PPE detection, injured people), to operational efficiency (e.g. material tracking, congestion monitoring). We offer both long range wireless (1km range) and wired sensor variants to suit any deployment.

Our co-founders Xerxes and Philip are passionate about empowering our partners in the fast approaching world of physical AI and robotics. We are a small, fast growing team who hail from Anduril, Tesla, Uber, and the U.S. Special Forces.

**The Role**Specter is hiring a full stack engineer to build and scale the applications that bring our sensing and perception platform to life. You'll be responsible for developing intuitive, high-performance interfaces and APIs that connect users to a world of real-time physical intelligence, spanning video, sensor data, and alerts across our distributed infrastructure. This role bridges Specter's cloud infrastructure and customer-facing experiences, owning the reliability, performance, and usability of the software surfaces that define how operators interact with the physical world.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement scalable full-stack web applications that visualize live sensor and video data.
• Build high-performance APIs and data models in PostgreSQL, ensuring low-latency reads and writes for time-series and event data.
• Develop rich, reactive dashboards and control interfaces using React, TypeScript, and TanStack Query/Router/Table.
• Integrate real-time updates from WebSockets, Kafka streams, or REST APIs into intuitive front-end components.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to optimize performance across the edge–cloud pipeline.
• Implement secure authentication, role-based access control, and enterprise-grade user management.
• Own end-to-end feature development (from schema design to front-end polish) in mission-critical applications.

Qualifications:

• Deep experience with React, TypeScript, and modern web app patterns (hooks, context, component-driven design).
• Strong backend experience with Node.js or Python, and relational database design in PostgreSQL.
• Expertise in TanStack (Query, Router, Table) for state management, data synchronization, and UI responsiveness.
• Familiarity with WebSockets, GraphQL, or real-time event delivery systems.
• Experience building and deploying applications in Docker or Kubernetes environments.
• Solid understanding of data modeling, caching, and API performance optimization.
• Experience visualizing spatial, temporal, or operational data (e.g., with Mapbox, Recharts, D3).
• Interest in physical AI, IoT, or large-scale distributed sensing systems.