Senior Systems Software Engineer

About Us:

How many companies can say they’ve been in business for over 177 years?!

Here at ZEISS, we certainly can! As the pioneers of science, ZEISS handles the everchanging environments in a fast-paced world, meeting it with cutting edge of technologies and continuous advancements. ZEISS believes that innovation and technology are the key to a sustainable future and solutions for global change. We have a diverse range of portfolios throughout the ZEISS family in segments like, Industrial Quality & Research, Medical Technology, Consumer Markets and Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology. We are a global company with over 42,000 employees and have over 4,000 in the US and Canada alone! Make a difference, come join the team!

What’s the Role?

The Senior Systems Software Engineer – Industrial CT Automation at ZEISS Industrial Quality Services (IQS) is a key individual contributor responsible for designing and implementing systems software that connects third-party automation systems to the ZEISS Inspect evaluation platform. The role focuses on building robust, scalable back-end services (primarily gRPC), ensuring reliability, and developing test/DevOps pipelines for production-grade deployments in semiconductor advanced packaging. The engineer collaborates with internal teams across automation, controls, metrology, and machine learning to translate requirements into production-ready solutions, improve fault tolerance and observability, and support global deployments in customer fabs.

Sound Interesting?

Here’s what you’ll do:

•  Design and implement back-end services and interfaces (primarily gRPC) that integrate third-party automation systems with ZEISS Inspect for CT-based advanced packaging inspection.
• Own service-level concerns including performance, reliability, observability, fault tolerance, and secure deployment of production services.
• Develop and maintain automated test pipelines (unit, integration, hardware-/system-in-the-loop) and contribute to CI/CD workflows (builds, artifacts, deployments).
• Collaborate closely with automation, controls, metrology, and machine learning teams across IQS and SMT to refine requirements and deliver production-ready integrations.
• Implement and tune data exchange/serialization mechanisms (e.g., Protocol Buffers) and support secure, role-appropriate service communication.
• Instrument services for metrics, logging, and tracing to support robust monitoring and rapid issue diagnosis.
• Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and continuous improvement of engineering practices, coding standards, and architecture patterns.
• Produce clear technical documentation and operational runbooks for deployment, support, and handover to operations and field organizations.
• Support investigation and resolution of escalated production issues related to CT automation software components.

Do you qualify?

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or a related field; Master’s degree preferred.

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience in back-end or systems software roles.

• Strong coding proficiency in C++ and C# with working proficiency in Python.

• Demonstrated experience building server architectures and networked services (ideally gRPC or similar RPC frameworks).

• Hands-on experience with DevOps and testing pipelines (e.g., Git-based CI, automated builds/tests, artifact management, deployments).

• Solid software engineering fundamentals: version control, code reviews, debugging/profiling, and writing maintainable, testable code.

​Good-to-Haves:

• Experience with industrial/automation systems: robots, motion controllers, PLCs, machine controllers, or factory MES.

• Experience with Windows and Linux service development, containerization (e.g., Docker), and orchestration environments.

• Knowledge of observability practices (metrics/logging/tracing) and performance tuning for high-throughput systems.

• Familiarity with data exchange/serialization (Protocol Buffers) and secure service communication / RBAC concepts.

• Experience with imaging/vision, CT, metrology, or semiconductor manufacturing environments.

Compensation:

• Central/Midwest: $110,000 – $138,000 per year

• San Francisco Bay Area: $149,000 – $186,000 per year

The pay offered for this role may be influenced