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About the role
Design and build low-latency networking infrastructure connecting embedded devices and cloud systems — protocol design, congestion handling, and tuning for throughput and reliability across a distributed sensor network Build resource-efficient pipelines to ingest and egress multimodal sensor data and telemetry, handling packetization, buffering, and backpressure across constrained device environments
What they're looking for
- Broad systems experience across the areas below, with demonstrable depth in at least one — whether that's networking, video/sensor pipelines, or low-level Linux systems work
- Production Rust (preferred) or C++ in low-latency, embedded, or systems contexts — with real ownership of performance, reliability, and resource constraints
- Deep networking knowledge (UDP, TCP, QUIC) beyond the API level — packet loss, flow control, retransmission, and tuning for real-world conditions, strong Linux systems fundamentals including IPC, scheduling, and memory management
- Hands-on hardware integration experience — cameras, IMUs, or other sensors — including driver interfaces, kernel boundaries, and video pipelines (capture, encode/decode, streaming via V4L2, GStreamer, FFmpeg, or similar)
- Proficiency with concurrency and parallel programming — lock-free structures, async runtimes, thread management — with a track record of shipping correct, performant, concurrent code
- Comfortable owning CI infrastructure, test harnesses, benchmarking pipelines, and observability tooling alongside feature work
More about this role
Company Background
Specter's mission is to help automate the physical world.
Today, we build video sensors with state-of-the-art AI agents that answer any question, anywhere in their environments. Our systems can automatically detect and reason about any physical activity captured on camera, from security incidents (e.g. perimeter intrusion, theft, LPR), to safety monitoring (e.g. PPE detection, injured people), to operational efficiency (e.g. material tracking, congestion monitoring). We offer both long range wireless (1km range) and wired sensor variants to suit any deployment.
Our co-founders Xerxes and Philip are passionate about empowering our partners in the fast approaching world of physical AI and robotics. We are a small, fast growing team who hail from Anduril, Tesla, Uber, and the U.S. Special Forces.
The Role
Specter is hiring a Software Systems Engineer to build the real-time device software at the heart of our platform — spanning sensor integration, video pipelines, low-latency networking, and the infrastructure that ties it all together. This role owns the full stack from hardware interface to cloud edge, working closely with ML, perception, and platform teams to...
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