Software Engineer - Manufacturing Data Platform & Automation

About the role

• We are seeking a hands-on software engineer to build and own the internal data platform for Lyte's manufacturing operations. Lyte's optical engines, sensors, and systems are built across an internal NPI line and a network of external partners - OSATs, contract manufacturers, and FATP sites. Every step produces data: test results, yields, inventory movements, BOM changes, supplier pricing. Today that data sits in separate systems, spreadsheets, and station log files, and answering a routine question can cost an engineer hours of manual work. You will build a web-based internal portal, backed by a unified database and automated data pipelines, giving engineering, operations, and supply chain a single place to find, analyze, and act on production data. This is an end-to-end role, you will own the data model, the pipelines, the API, the front end, and the users. You will be the primary engineer on this platform, working directly with hardware, test, and operations engineers rather than inside a large software organization, so self-direction and comfort with ambiguity matter more than depth in any single framework.

What you'll do

• Develop a web application (front end plus REST API) that lets users search, filter, and pull data across device, optical engine, component, and system-level databases.
• Implement authentication, role-based access control, and tiered data visibility so that cost, supplier, and yield data is seen only by those authorized to see it.
• Act as the platform administrator — manage users and permissions, monitor uptime, handle backups and data retention, and maintain documentation.
• Build and maintain automated pipelines that ingest test, process, and yield data from in-house stations and from external OSAT, CM, and FATP partners into a central store.
• Handle the realities of manufacturing data: file-based drops (CSV, log, Excel), inconsistent formats between suppliers, late or duplicate data, schema drift, and unreliable cross-site network links.
• Design a data model supporting unit-level traceability — serial number, lot, station, timestamp, test limits, and revision — so any unit can be traced end to end.
• Add validation and monitoring so missing, stale, or out-of-spec data is flagged automatically rather than discovered weeks later.
• Build auto-grading and binning of components against engineering-defined criteria from test data.
• Provide flexible correlation and data-mining tools with configurable charting, so engineers can explore relationships across parameters without writing code.
• Automate recurring weekly reports, dashboards, and presentation exports, delivered on schedule to the right distribution lists.
• Support process capability and yield analysis (Cp, Cpk, trend and control charts) and expose it in the dashboard for yield projection.
• Build standard web forms for BOM entry, BOM shipment forms, and other structured input, replacing today's ad-hoc spreadsheets.
• Track multiple approved suppliers per component, including price history and price adjustments over time, and automate BOM cost roll-up and overall production cost calculation.
• Track inventory against build plan and projected BOM consumption, and automatically alert the responsible owner when a component is projected short.
• Work directly with engineering, test, operations, and supply-chain stakeholders across multiple sites and time zones to gather requirements and prioritize new features.
• Train users, write clear documentation, and drive adoption of the platform across the organization.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent hands-on project experience.
• 2+ years building web applications end to end: a modern front-end framework (React, Vue, or Angular) backed by a REST API (Node.js, Flask, FastAPI, or Django). This is the core of the role.
• Strong Python, plus JavaScript or TypeScript, with demonstrated experience writing automation scripts, data-processing jobs, and data-visualization code.
• Solid SQL and relational data modeling — designing schemas, writing non-trivial queries, and integrating data from multiple source systems.
• Practical understanding of authentication, role-based access control, and web application security, sufficient to administer a multi-user internal tool holding confidential cost and supplier data.
• Strong written and verbal communication. You will gather requirements directly from engineers and operations staff across multiple sites and time zones and translate them into working software.
• Self-directed and comfortable owning a system end to end with minimal supervision, with high attention to detail and sound judgment handling confidential company, supplier, and cost data.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building internal tools, dashboards, or data platforms for a hardware or manufacturing organization, particularly with an OSAT, contract manufacturer, or FATP partner.
• Exposure to semiconductor, photonics/optics, or electro-mechanical manufacturing, and familiarity with terms such as BOM, ECO, wafer test, OSAT, FATP, and yield.
• ETL and workflow orchestration experience (Airflow, Prefect, Dagster, or equivalent) and scheduled job design.
• Statistical process control fundamentals (Cp, Cpk, control charts) and experience with JMP, Minitab, or Python statistics libraries.
• Experience with BOM/MRP-style data structures: multi-supplier component tracking, price-history logging, and automated cost roll-ups.
• Dashboarding and reporting tools (Power BI, Tableau, Plotly/Dash, Grafana, Metabase) and automated report or email generation.
• Cloud deployment (AWS, Azure, or GCP), Docker, Git-based workflows, and basic CI/CD.
• Experience moving data reliably across sites and international network boundaries, including partner sites in Asia.
• Experience training end users and driving adoption of an internally built tool across a cross-functional organization..

Benefits (subject to location and local regulations)

• Competitive salary and equity 
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage 
• 401(k) retirement plan 
• Flexible vacation and time-off policy 
• Collaborative, fast-paced, and inclusive work environment 
• Opportunity to work on cutting-edge technologies with a highly cross-functional team