Staff Software Engineer

Job Title

Staff Software Engineer

Role Summary

The Staff Software Engineer will architect and implement software for a standardized EFEM (Equipment Front End Module) platform, including wafer handling, robotics coordination, safety interlocks, motion control, and factory automation interfaces. The role leads software design, integrates hardware subsystems, and contributes to a scalable platform adopted across Onto products.

Experience Level

Senior (Staff) level. The posting expects approximately 10+ years of relevant software engineering experience for this role.

Responsibilities

Primary responsibilities include:

• Lead software engineering on new projects: gather requirements, define robust designs, and coordinate with hardware engineers for HW/SW integration.
• Develop software modules for wafer-handling robotics, load ports, sensors, pre-aligners, and system orchestration.
• Design extensible APIs, control interfaces, and internal communication frameworks.
• Optimize software performance and ensure scalability across products.
• Mentor and guide junior engineers; promote code and architecture quality.
• Develop automated tests, simulation tools, and validation frameworks for EFEM software.
• Troubleshoot system-level issues, perform data analysis, and optimize EFEM software performance.
• Drive process, architecture, and code-quality improvements across teams and modules.

Requirements

Must-have qualifications:

• Proven experience (typically 10+ years for Staff level) leading architecture and design of large-scale, mission-critical software systems.
• Experience driving technical roadmaps, resolving cross-team dependencies, and balancing performance, maintainability, and schedule tradeoffs.
• Strong hardware-software integration experience with complex electromechanical systems.
• Deep expertise in .NET runtime behavior, performance, threading, and memory management.
• Strong proficiency in C# using modern language features.
• Experience structuring systems using clean architectural patterns, dependency injection, modularity, and API versioning.
• Mastery of concurrency design: multithreading, synchronization, message passing/actor models, and preventing deadlocks/race conditions.
• Experience designing and maintaining APIs and integration points, including internal IPC (gRPC, message bus, shared memory) and external factory-host interfaces.
• Demonstrated ability to debug complex multi-threaded environments.
• Willingness and ability to travel internationally at least 20% of the time.

Nice-to-have / Preferred:

• Experience in the semiconductor industry, robotics, or similar sectors.
• Familiarity with SEMI standards such as E84, E87, E90, E30, E37.

Education Requirements

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.

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.