Senior Software Engineer

Job Title

Senior Software Engineer

Role Summary

Join the Inspection Business Unit to develop and maintain software and algorithms for Onto's inspection platforms. The role works across optics, motion, electronics, image acquisition, and software to translate customer requirements into reliable, high-performance solutions.

Collaborate with hardware engineers, application engineers, technical project managers, and product teams on new product development and production support.

Experience Level

Senior - typically 5+ years of relevant software and systems engineering experience.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities scale with experience; senior engineers take broad ownership of architecture, cross-team problem solving, and mentoring.

• Maintain and refine an accurate system-level mental model of the full inspection platform (optics, motion, electronics, image acquisition, and software).
• Translate customer problems and application requirements into well-scoped engineering tasks spanning subsystem boundaries.
• Design, implement, test, and optimize algorithms for image processing, computer vision, and machine learning integrated into inspection platforms.
• Develop optical imaging modeling, calibration, and image segmentation/classification/detection algorithms.
• Write, test, debug, and optimize production-quality software for performance and scalability (including GPU and multi-threaded environments).
• Perform requirement analysis, detailed software design, and produce associated test plans; participate in design and code reviews.
• Participate in New Product Development with cross-functional teams and support production deployments and troubleshooting.
• Leverage AI coding agents to accelerate implementation while maintaining ownership of architecture, design integrity, and code quality.
• Document designs, system rationale, development processes, and troubleshooting; provide technical mentorship and improve team workflows.

Requirements

Key technical skills and experience required or strongly preferred.

• Must-have: Demonstrated ability to reason about systems at multiple levels of abstraction and decompose cross-subsystem problems.
• Strong problem-solving, analytical, and communication skills; able to present complex system behavior to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Competency in a numerically focused environment such as Python or MATLAB, including linear algebra, image processing, and/or machine learning libraries.
• Competency in a compiled or production language such as C++, C#, or Java.
• Experience producing production code with testing, debugging, and performance optimization practices; experience debugging complex multi-threaded software is valuable.
• Familiarity with version control and CI/CD practices.
• Nice-to-have: Experience in semiconductor inspection, machine vision, robotics, embedded systems, hardware communication protocols, real-time constraints, cross-subsystem diagnosis, and effective use of AI coding agents.

Education Requirements

PhD, MS, or Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Physics, or a related technical field; or equivalent practical experience.

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.