Senior Software Engineer

Job Title

Senior Software Engineer

Role Summary

Join the Inspection Business Unit to design and implement software and algorithms for Onto's inspection platform. The role requires system-level thinking across optics, motion, electronics, image acquisition, and software, and close collaboration with hardware, application, and product teams.

Experience Level

Senior - role implies broad technical ownership and leadership. The posting does not specify a particular number of years of experience.

Responsibilities

Scope varies by experience; senior engineers assume wider ownership and mentorship responsibilities.

• Maintain and refine a system-level model of the inspection platform (optics, motion, electronics, image acquisition, software).
• Translate customer and application requirements into well-scoped engineering tasks across subsystem boundaries.
• Design, implement, test, and optimize algorithms for image processing, computer vision, and machine learning.
• Develop optical imaging modeling, calibration, segmentation, classification, and detection algorithms.
• Write, test, debug, and optimize production-quality software for performance and scalability.
• Participate in new product development alongside hardware engineers, application engineers, and program/product managers.
• Perform requirement analysis, detailed software design, and create test plans; lead these activities at senior level.
• Conduct and participate in design and code reviews; document designs, system rationale, and troubleshooting steps.
• Mentor teammates, support continuous learning, and help improve development workflows, including AI-assisted practices.

Requirements

Key technical and behavioral requirements; travel expectation included.

• Demonstrated systems-thinking ability to reason across multiple levels of abstraction and subsystems.
• Strong problem-solving, analytical, and communication skills for technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Proficiency in a numerically focused environment such as Python or MATLAB (linear algebra, image processing, ML libraries).
• Proficiency in a compiled or production language used at scale (C++, C#, or Java).
• Experience writing, testing, and debugging production software, including multi-threaded or complex environments.
• Willingness and ability to travel internationally at least 20% of the time.

• Experience in semiconductor inspection, machine vision, robotics, or hardware/software co-design domains.
• Track record diagnosing cross-subsystem issues spanning optics, electronics, firmware, and application software.
• Experience using AI coding agents to accelerate development.
• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum/Kanban, version control, CI/CD, embedded systems, hardware communication protocols, and real-time constraints.

Education Requirements

PhD, MS, or Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Physics, or a related field (the posting lists Doctorate, Master's, or Bachelor's degrees without specifying years of experience tied to each level).

About the Company

Company: Onto Innovation

Headquarters: Wilmington, MA, United States

Onto Innovation develops process-control solutions for the semiconductor industry, offering optical inspection, 3D metrology, defect inspection, composition analysis, factory analytics, and lithography technologies to improve yield, performance, and reliability across the semiconductor value chain.