Senior Staff Software Engineer at John Deere
Santa Clara, CA
$157,488–$236,232from the description
Jul 7, 2026
Santa Clara, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual-contributor role on a robotics platform team, focused on maintaining and improving the full software stack for autonomous machinery — spanning C++ build pipelines, ROS 2 middleware (including a migration from Fast DDS to Zenoh), containerized environments, and cloud backends. The position also involves designing core autonomy components such as state machines and behavior trees, diagnosing complex distributed-system failures, and mentoring other engineers. Suits a seasoned systems-level C++ engineer with deep robotics infrastructure experience.
Staff level · 10+ years · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 150 people in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 110–230
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $217,796 (middle half $177,469–$231,052). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (5)
The title 'Senior Staff Software Engineer' maps to Staff seniority: the role carries org-wide technical leadership scope (cross-stack ownership, middleware architecture, mentoring), which is above a typical Senior IC but does not appear to involve people management.
The degree requirement states 'Bachelor's or equivalent related work experience', so no formal degree is hard-gated; degree requirement is set to None.
CMake, colcon, and Bazel are listed together as a single build-system requirement with 'and/or' framing; colcon and Bazel are captured as alternatives to CMake.
All 'What Makes You Stand Out' items are preferred/nice-to-have; none are hard gates despite the robotics-specific depth they describe.
VISA sponsorship is explicitly unavailable for this position.
Read the full posting
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