SomanaNix Engineer
Somana is hiring a Nix Engineer for a remote role open to applicants in United States. Level rates it ; you can apply on Somana.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this role Works on AI ●●●○: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- The posting lists this role as remote.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include Nix, Nixos and Linux.
- Level lists 3 other open roles at Somana.
- The role was posted in the last few days.
AI in this role
Build and maintain Nix-based infrastructure and deployment tools for physical AI and robotics systems.
Somana is a generative robotics company. We founded the company because the incredible advances in the modeling layer have no way to access a fragmented physical world. We're building the connective tissue that brings physical AI into the industrial world.
Somana is a hardware, software, and services platform powering rapid improvements in capacity, throughput, yield, and quality. Our compute platform talks to hundreds of peripherals, living on factory floors and has capabilities that compound after every run - which means the mechanical systems that house, cool, protect, and connect them are as critical as the silicon itself.
Why We Use Nix
Central to our proposition: architecting the right abstractions and modular system components.
The world of edge compute comes with unique challenges: reliability, observability, controllability, etc. These challenges compound if mis-modeled or mishandled, doubly so with the velocity and heterogeneity of the industrial deployments we target. Remotely reasoning over stateful nonsense, imperatively-managed hosts, or otherwise having facts about a fleet that aren’t derivable from a git SHA, are all nonstarters.
Nix alone provides us with the declarative, immutable base atop which we can author system components, reason about them in isolation, and reuse them in novel deployment environments.
As a Nix Engineer at Somana, you will build out the tools we use to target downstream software environments, perform NixOS bringup on our state-of-the-art hardware, and develop our build, deployment, and CI/CD tools that deliver reliable systems to our customers.
Who You Are
Senior software engineer fluent in Nix
Bonus: Rust, Go, Python, TypeScript
Deep Nix, NixOS, Linux, and systemd knowledge
Bonus: experience with non-”NixOS” Nix-built OSes
Bonus: CUDA, L4T
Embedded and/or edge experience
Bonus: industrial environments, factory floors
Bonus: passionate about the commercial industrial base!
Interested in inventing novel ways of composing Linux systems + our core developer platform: the abstractions, plumbing, and deployment layer!
If you've already built a compute or electro-mechanical product line from scratch, shipped it at volume, and you're looking for the kind of ownership and impact that only exists at a dynamic early stage company, we'd love to talk!
LOCATION & COMPENSATION:
SoHo, New York City
Competitive salary + meaningful equity - this is a foundational role on a small team
Catered lunch, snacks, panoramic views, and pet-friendly office
Health, Dental, Vision benefits + 401k
How we rate this
Nix Engineer at Somana rates 65 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- What's a project where you used Nix hands-on?
- Walk me through how you've used Nixos in your day-to-day work.
- What are the limits of Linux that you've run into, and how did you work around them?
- What's a project where you used Systemd hands-on?
- Walk me through how you've used Rust in your day-to-day work.
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Nix, Nixos, Linux, Systemd, and Rust. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.
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