Six Figure Work

Principal Software Engineer

Midjourney

Company websitemidjourney.com (Midjourney, opens in new tab)

Base salary $268K  to $279K

Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range in San Francisco, CA +1 more

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  • LocationSan Francisco, CA +1 more
  • WorkplaceOn-site
  • Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
  • Last checked (3 h ago) · observed since
All places named
  • San Francisco, CA
  • San Francisco Bay Area Hybrid

About this job

What you’ll do

  1. Act as the technical lead for large parts of the scanner platform: system architecture, codebase structure, and long-term maintainability.

  2. Own core runtime foundations: distributed control, state management, fault handling, and reliability.

  3. Drive engineering rigor: testability, code quality, review standards, performance regression prevention, and release processes.

  4. Build robust observability: logs, metrics, traces, and replayable diagnostics (with privacy constraints).

  5. Collaborate with hardware and recon/ML teams to define interfaces, data contracts, timing/synchronization, and failure modes.

  6. Lead complex refactors (e.g., message passing / RPC boundaries, modularization, concurrency model) without halting forward progress.

What we’re looking for

  • Deep software architecture experience for real-world systems: robotics, instrumentation, medical devices, or other complex distributed products.

  • Strong Python and concurrency background (asyncio, multiprocessing, profiling, performance engineering).

  • Track record of shipping systems that are observable, debuggable, and resilient.

  • Strong technical leadership: clarity, pragmatic trade-offs, and mentoring.

Useful experience

  • Building but rock-solid systems: clear interfaces (gRPC/protobuf or equivalent), strong state modeling, and failure handling.

  • High-leverage engineering habits on a lean team: good tests, CI, reproducible dev environments, and fast code review.

  • Practical performance + concurrency work in Python (asyncio, profiling, multiprocessing) and comfort debugging distributed behavior.

  • Security-minded device software: safe defaults, encrypted data paths, and disciplined handling of PII/PHI.

  • Operational thinking: remote updates/management, excellent logging, and diagnostics that make real hardware debuggable.

Source: Midjourney on Ashby · View original posting (opens in new tab)

Pay in context

This role's base floor ($268,000) is above 93% of the 4,209 Software Engineering roles in California listed on this site; 2 others list the same floor. Their median floor is $176,500; the middle half runs from $149,400 to $204,000.

Only jobs on this site count, and each one publishes a base salary of $100,000 or more, so this compares six-figure jobs with each other, not with the whole market. Computed Nov 5, 2026.

This range next to 6 other live Midjourney roles with the nearest advertised base floor
Chart as a table
This range next to 6 other live Midjourney roles with the nearest advertised base floor
RolePublished base
Principal Software Engineer (this listing)$268K - $279K
Principal Machine Learning Engineer (Reconstruction / Quantitative Imaging)$290K - $302K
Principal Electrical Engineer (Design Lead)$241K - $250K
Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Clinical Team)$237K - $250K
Senior Cloud / Data Engineer (Data / Reconstruction / HIPAA)$215K - $222K
Senior Mechanical Engineer (Medical)$185K - $193K
Hardware Physicist$155K - $159K

Same $100K to $400K scale as every card. All Midjourney roles · How to read the bar

Observed changes

  1. Began meeting the published-salary criteria
  2. First observed on the employer's board
Observed since
Employer-stated posting date
2026-06-30
Where this pay comes from

Location as the employer wrote it: San Francisco • San Francisco Bay Area Hybrid

USD 268,000 – 279,000 · 1 YEAR · Salary

Method
Structured pay field published by the employer
Checked
Rule set
us-base-v2

The employer's job board publishes this pay as a dedicated data field. We read the field directly; no interpretation was needed.

What we verified

  • The pay figures come from the employer's own listing, quoted exactly above.
  • The pay is an annual base salary in US dollars with a minimum of at least $100,000.
  • The role was publicly listed on the employer's job board when last checked.

We do not verify what the employer will actually offer, whether the employer is still recruiting for the role, or anything beyond what the employer published. Full methodology.