Lead Software Engineer, Sensing Platform

The Engineering Challenge

Building software for machines introduces challenges that traditional software systems rarely face. Devices operate in real-world environments, networks are unreliable, and software must interact with hardware, sensors, and real-time data.

At Viam, engineers build the platform and tools that make those machines programmable, observable, and manageable at scale.

About the Team

New York City (Hybrid 3+ days per week in office)

The Sensing team owns the data pipeline from hardware to cloud—from driver-level integration through streaming delivery to the Viam platform. It’s foundational work: cameras are the starting point for most solutions built on Viam.

Primarily work in C++ and collaborates closely with Motion, Vision, and Solutions Engineering. Ownership spans three areas:

• Audio. Text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and always-on processing for wake-word detection and sound-triggered actions. Active with a customer, touching ML pipelines alongside lower-level systems work.
• Streaming infrastructure. The full path from sensor to cloud. Efficient pipelines with tight control over buffering, latency, and failure handling, and a WebRTC delivery layer so users can pull a live feed directly in app.viam.com.
• Camera and sensor pipelines. Integrating and stabilizing a wide range of hardware including Realsense, Orbbec, RTSP streams, CSI cameras, and webcams on Linux, macOS, and Windows, often in resource-constrained customer environments.

What You'll Own

As Lead you'll manage a team of 4 engineers across camera integration, streaming infrastructure, and audio, reporting to the VP of Engineering.

• Managing the team: clear priorities, career development, making sure they have what they need
• Owning technical direction: what gets built, what gets cut, and why
• Architecting the streaming pipeline: WebRTC delivery, RTP efficiency, on-device buffering, latency tradeoffs from capture to browser
• Leading the audio work in production with a customer: wake-word detection, TTS/STT, sound-triggered actions
• Debugging complex issues spanning C++ driver behavior, OS interactions, and customer hardware
• Working closely with Motion and Vision so sensing integrates cleanly across the platform

What You Bring

We’re looking for a technical lead with strong systems judgment who can own direction for the team, make hard technical calls, and work cross-functionally across engineering. No robotics or AV background required, the domain is learnable, strong engineering fundamentals are what matter here.

• Team leadership: setting technical direction, owning decisions, keeping engineers moving
• Building and debugging complex production systems, going deep when the problem requires it
• Performance-sensitive or real-time systems: latency, buffering, data transport, pipeline efficiency. Streaming or WebRTC experience is a plus but not required
• Cross-team technical work across multiple systems or teams
• Shipping under real constraints with sound judgment on tradeoffs
• Robotics, IoT, or embedded systems: useful context, not a requirement

How We Work

Our culture emphasizes ownership, curiosity, and decisive execution.

• This space has brand new challenges and we all have an appetite to learn
• Good work in production beats perfect work in review
• We know that the best teams help each other succeed through feedback
• Great engineers come from many backgrounds. If you're excited about the challenges we’re solving, we encourage you to apply. 

The salary for this role is between $220,000 - 250,000 /year. Your exact offer will vary based on factors, including experience level, skillset, market location, and balancing internal equity relative to peers at the company. We recognize that the person we hire may be less experienced, or more senior, than this job description as posted. In these situations, the updated salary range will be communicated to you as a candidate.