Principal Engineer / Senior Desktop Engineer

• July 11, 2026 • 100% • Indefinite duration • Lausanne Principal Engineer / Senior Desktop Engineer • Full time • Department: AI Agents • Department: AI Agents • Division: Engineering Company Description Nexthink is the leader in employee digital experience management software. The company offers IT managers unprecedented visibility, allowing them to see, diagnose, and resolve large-scale issues affecting employees everywhere, with any application or network, before employees notice the problem. As the first solution enabling IT to move from reactive problem solving to proactive optimization, Nexthink enables more than 1,500 customers to offer better digital experiences to more than 25 million employees. Having two headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Boston, Massachusetts, Nexthink has 9 offices worldwide. Job Description We are looking for a principal or senior desktop applications engineer to join the team designing, architecting, and implementing our AI-powered IT self-service chat agent - a native desktop application distributed to more than 20 million endpoints worldwide. This client is the showcase of the Nexthink AI platform, offering employees a seamless and responsive experience directly on their Windows and macOS devices. As a senior desktop engineer, you will go beyond implementation: you will define the technical direction of the client layer, influence cross-team design decisions, and serve as a trusted advisor to both technical and product management. You will tackle issues of performance, reliability, and native operating system integration while collaborating with backend, infrastructure, and security teams to deliver a production-quality application at a global scale. This is a high-impact, high-responsibility role where you will make fundamental architectural decisions regarding the client platform and help shape the desktop engineering practice at Nexthink. Responsibilities Define and drive the technical vision and architectural strategy of the desktop client application. Lead the design of a high-performance native desktop application running on Windows and macOS across more than 20 million endpoints. Collaborate with product, backend, and AI/ML teams to align the client experience with the global AI platform. Provide technical leadership on client architecture, coding standards, and best practices for native desktop development. Architect and deliver a reliable and secure application covering the entire distribution cycle: signing, packaging, installation, updates, and uninstallation. Promote observability, crash reporting, performance monitoring, and diagnostics across the client stack. Act as a mentor and multiplier, elevating the technical level and helping engineers progress. Lead technical deep dives, design reviews, and roadmap alignment discussions with management. Ensure that security, compliance, and OS-level integration best practices are built-in by design. Qualifications More than 7 years of experience in desktop application engineering, with delivery of native applications on Windows and macOS. Proven success in designing and delivering client applications to large user bases, with a deep understanding of platform-specific constraints and behaviors. Strong mastery of Rust and/or C++, with proven experience in building cross-platform desktop applications; experience with Tauri is a significant asset. Deep knowledge of Windows and macOS operating system APIs. Hands-on experience with the full application distribution cycle: code signing, packaging, automatic update mechanisms, and large-scale deployment. Good understanding of desktop application performance profiling, memory management, and crash diagnostics. Exceptional communication skills - capable of influencing cross-functional teams and management with a clear technical orientation. Proven experience in mentoring and elevating engineering teams. Nice to have Familiarity with the Tauri framework. Familiarity with React and TypeScript UI development. Experience integrating desktop clients with cloud backends via REST, WebSockets, or gRPC. Systems programming experience: OS hooks, accessibility APIs, inter-process communication. Prior work on applications with silent background processes, system tray agents, or notification-based UX. Experience with endpoint telemetry, observability SDKs, or client-side APM integration. Experience in enterprise software distribution and managing large-scale application update strategies. Additional Information We are the pioneers and scouts of a global IT market category (DEX) that is shaping the future of work in the world, offering our customers' IT teams total digital visibility across their enterprise. Our innovative solutions integrate real-time analytics, automation, and employee feedback across all endpoints. This enables our IT teams to resolve complex technical challenges, create increasingly productive work environments, and provide happy and satisfied employees in the digital workplace. With more than 1200 employees across 5 continents, Nexthink operates as a single