Staff Software Engineer

Somewhere in a senior living community right now, a camera and a small computer are working together to figure out whether the person who just fell is okay. The community’s network connection may be fiddly and unreliable, and the deployed hardware has its own quirks. That system is one of thousands just like it, running software your team wrote, doing work that matters if something goes wrong.

This is the job: building and evolving the systems that enable edge hardware (including cameras and other sensors), and cloud infrastructure to work together reliably, at scale, even when a connection drops or a device behaves in a way nobody planned for.

If you’ve spent real time in Linux, networking, or hardware because you were curious rather than because a job required it, we think you could thrive in this role. We care less about whether you’ve used our exact stack before and more about whether you’re the kind of engineer who takes a system apart, mentally or literally, until you understand why it works.

You’ll define the architecture for Sage’s edge computing platform, own hard and often unsolved problems (e.g. fall detection, resident location tracking, integrating unpredictable third-party hardware), and help set the technical bar for the engineering org. You’ll also mentor other engineers and be a voice in how we build, not just what we build.

What You’ll Do

• Shape the architecture of a fleet of edge devices deployed in the physical world, and the cloud systems that orchestrate, monitor, and update them
• Dig into ambiguous, often novel problems (resident location modeling, fall detection, sensor fusion)
• Build the diagnostic tooling that lets us understand what’s happening on hardware we can’t just walk up to
• Get hands-on with remote troubleshooting when something breaks in the field, reasoning about network, hardware, and software all at once
• Work directly with other Sage teams to ship solutions end to end collaboratively
• Review code and run design discussions, and help less experienced engineers get better by through teaching and explaining
• Push back on us when there’s a better way to build something; we’d rather be right than consistent

This describes the kind of engineer who tends to thrive in this role. If most of it sounds like you, we want to hear from you, even if your resume doesn’t map cleanly onto “IoT engineer.”

• You have professional experience working in complex backend systems: This usually means at least 7+ years of work experience, building (and sometimes breaking) within systems that grew and changed over time.
• You understand systems, not just frameworks: You’re comfortable in Linux/Unix environments well past the level of running commands you looked up. You’ve broken things, debugged them, and come out the other side understanding what happened.
• You have real depth in at least one language (object-oriented or otherwise; Java, C++, Rust, Go, Python, and C# are all fine signals) with strong computing fundamentals and can reason about memory, concurrency, and performance at a lower level.
• You have working knowledge of networking, enough to reason about what happens when a device drops offline mid-update, or why a connection is behaving strangely, without needing to look up the fundamentals first.
• You’re demonstrably curious, e.g. in side projects, open source contributions, a home lab, a technical hobby, or a history of teaching yourself things. We care less about the domain than that it exists.
• You can hold complexity and still ship. You’ve led a technical effort, official title or not, from a fuzzy problem to a real outcome, and you know how to make tradeoffs under ambiguity.

Re: years of experience: we’re not fixated on the number. We care about depth and range. Someone with 6 years of genuinely varied, hands-on systems work will often be a stronger fit than someone with 10 years in a narrow web stack. If you’re unsure whether your background counts, apply anyway and let us figure that out together., * Strong, well-reasoned opinions about tools and technologies, including ones you’d argue against using

• Experience with RF communication or hands-on hardware/embedded work
• Experience customizing Linux distributions for commercial deployment
• Experience designing across edge and cloud environments, including OTA updates and fleet management
• Familiarity with a major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure). We use AWS, but we’re more interested in your ability to reason about distributed systems generally than in prior AWS-specific experience

Our benefits package for employees includes competitive base compensation along with stock options. The expected annual salary range for this role is $190,000-245,000 USD, depending on your level of expertise, your experience, and your performance in the interview process. We also provide fully-paid health and dental insurance coverage for all of our employees, along with other health benefits including vision insurance, membership to premium primary and urgent care, and online medical health providers. We also have a take as you need time off policy, in addition to 7 paid holidays and a company wide winter break during the holidays.

Sage is the care intelligence platform for senior living and skilled nursing. We connect the hardware senior care runs on, including nurse call, fall management, and wander management, with software caregivers actually use. That consistent use is what produces reliable data, and reliable data is what gives operators a true picture of how their communities are running.

Sage is a collaborative team of ambitious, multi-disciplinary entrepreneurs on a mission to reinvent senior care with a modern operating system for caregivers. Millions of people depend on this care getting better, and we move with the urgency that deserves.