Senior Software Engineer, C++

Job Description

This position is on-site in Budapest and requires EU residency and EU work visa.

General Info

We are building a computational imaging platform that recovers the physical optical properties of a scene — the illumination, the camera’s own response, and how real materials reflect and scatter light — from ordinary consumer camera capture. This is a difficult, high-impact engineering problem, and we are building the whole stack: capture, models, and the applications that run on them. The first keystone component is under provisional patent, with a broader patent family in progress.

This is a hands-on C++ engineering role for an engineer of exceptional technical depth: a top-tier MSc with a distinguished academic record and expert, thoroughly current command of modern C++, who writes highly efficient, scalable, maintainable, production-quality code every day. You will build the data interfaces and pipelines that connect our ML models to consumer applications, write the control software that drives camera sensors, lighting hardware, and dolly/motion-control systems, and integrate the full pipeline with our cloud server infrastructure. You will work shoulder to shoulder with ML engineers, GPU infrastructure teams, and consumer and commercial product engineers to solve hard, novel problems across the entire imaging stack. We are hiring for raw technical ability and specialist depth rather than accumulated years: someone who designs clean architecture, reasons rigorously about algorithms and performance, and consistently ships fast, reliable code. We would far rather have a deep specialist than a broad generalist.

This is a deliberately high-ceiling role. You will be one of a small number of engineers on the core stack, with your work in the product within your first months, direct ownership of subsystems you design yourself, and a clear path into technical leadership as the team scales around you. Scope here expands as fast as you can earn it. We would rather hire one exceptional engineer and give them room to grow into far more than staff this problem with generalists.

Tasks

System Development & Architecture

• Write highly efficient, scalable, and maintainable production-quality C++: clean, well-tested, and tuned for performance, latency, and memory on demanding real-time imaging workloads.
• Design and build the data interfaces and pipelines that feed our ML models and connect model output to consumer-facing applications.
• Develop robust control software that drives camera sensors, lighting hardware, and dolly/motion-control systems in tight coordination with the imaging pipeline.
• Integrate the pipeline with cloud server infrastructure, building reliable, low-latency services and APIs for data exchange between edge devices, mobile clients, and backend systems.
• Own the architecture of the subsystems you build across the imaging and analysis pipeline, balancing raw performance against long-term maintainability and scalability.
• Profile, benchmark, and optimize hot paths, hunting down bottlenecks and eliminating them at the algorithmic and systems level.

Requirements

Education & Experience

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a closely related field, from a top-tier programme, with a strong academic record. The MSc is a requirement for this role, not a preference. PhD-level candidates are equally welcome.
• Approximately 3–5 years of hands-on professional experience writing production C++; substantial internship and research work counts toward this. We weigh the depth and quality of what you have built far more heavily than the number of years behind it, and we want engineers who are still deep in the code every day.
• Expert-level, up-to-date command of modern C++ (C++17/20): highly efficient, optimized, production-grade code of the highest quality and reliability, with strong command of memory management, concurrency, and performance tuning.
• Demonstrable C++ code samples. Shortlisted candidates must be able to share substantial C++ they wrote themselves — a public repository, a thesis or research codebase, a personal project, or a permitted work sample — and walk through the design decisions in detail. Code review is a core part of our process.
• Exposure to data-intensive systems, pipelines, or backend services and APIs, ideally interfacing with ML models (inference/serving) or real-time data flows.
• Hands-on work — professional, academic, or personal — in one or more of: ML data and inference pipelines, image or sensor processing, hardware/device control, or cloud service integration.
• Comfortable working close to the hardware (sensors, cameras, real-time I/O) and up the stack (cloud services, mobile and consumer integration) as the problem demands.

Skills & Competencies

• Exceptional raw problem-solving ability and systems thinking, able to decompose complex, novel problems and reason rigorously about algorithms, data structures, performance, correctness, and trade-offs.
• Strong architectural instincts: the ability to design clean, well-factored systems that stay comprehensible and fast as they grow, and the judgement to know when to keep it simple.
• Comfort operating in a confidential, research-driven, fast-moving environment where requirements evolve quickly.
• Ability to collaborate effectively across ML, GPU/infrastructure, hardware, and product teams.
• Genuine passion for imaging, machine learning, and high-performance systems, with the drive to go deep and stay current with the state of the art.
• High ownership, sharp attention to detail, adaptability, and intellectual curiosity.
• Appetite to grow quickly. You treat code review as a tool for getting sharper, seek out whoever knows a given problem best, and want your scope to expand as fast as you can earn it.

Additional Preferred Experience

• Research, internship, or early-stage startup and R&D / innovation-lab experience, delivering novel work under ambiguity.
• Strong showing in competitive programming (ICPC, Codeforces, or similar), meaningful open-source contributions, or published research in systems, graphics, vision, or machine learning.
• Familiarity with GPU programming (e.g., CUDA), computer vision, camera/sensor pipelines, real-time systems, or ML model serving.
• Candidates must be eligible to work in Hungary, with fluent English, both written and spoken.

Compensation

In accordance with Hungary’s implementation of the EU Pay Transparency Directive (Directive (EU) 2023/970):

• Salary range: HUF 2,000,000 – HUF 3,000,000 gross per month, depending on demonstrated depth and experience.
• Discretionary performance bonus, with details discussed with shortlisted candidates.

Compensation decisions are made on the basis of objective, gender-neutral criteria, including relevant experience, technical skills, scope of responsibility, and demonstrated performance. The Company does not request salary history during the recruitment process.