Senior Engineer

We are hiring our first in-house engineer!

We are looking for someone who can navigate the codebase independently, rigorously test ideas, and deliver credible answers quickly. This person will be entrusted with open-ended questions and expected to return with working evidence, not speculation.

The majority of your time will be devoted to hands‑on development — prototypes, integrations, internal tools, and R&D experiments. The remainder will be spent serving as the company's technical anchor: the person our engineering partner relies on for alignment, and the person our CEO turns to for a definitive answer when one is needed.

This is an on‑site position based in Culver City, CA, where you will work hands‑on with the team and the hardware — a responsibility that will grow in importance as our robotics initiatives expand.

As the organization scales, this position is expected to evolve into a technical leadership role, with the opportunity to build and lead an engineering team. We are seeking a candidate who is an accomplished senior individual contributor today and is prepared to take on that next level of responsibility.

• Write production and prototype code across the stack. This is a hands‑on role, not a supervisory one.
• Stand up MVPs and working demos fast, then validate them with real data or real users before we commit engineering budget to them.
• Build the internal tools and lightweight automation that let a small team punch above its weight.
• Ship integrations with the devices, sensors, and third‑party services Grace depends on.

• Take open technical questions (new models, new hardware, new open‑source components) and turn them into working evidence.
• Run experiments end to end: scope them, build them, measure the results, write up what you found, and recommend a call.
• Experiment with robotics hands‑on. We expect four to five humanoids on‑site, and someone needs to be in the room with them. Robotics experience is a strong plus, but curiosity and speed matter more.
• Evaluate build‑vs.
  
  -buy‑vs.
  
  -integrate decisions, and be able to defend the answer.

• Answer day‑to‑day technical questions from the CEO and the business side directly and plainly, without a translation layer.
• Give leadership honest reads on feasibility, effort, and risk, so roadmap conversations are grounded in reality.
• Push back on scope creep and unrealistic timelines when a project's ambitions outpace its resourcing, and say so early.
• Support the team in building technical narratives for decks and funding rounds.

• 5+ years building software professionally, with a track record of shipping things real people used.
• Strong hands‑on engineering skills. You write code every day and you're good at it.
• Practical AI/ML fluency. You've built with LLMs, speech, or perception systems and understand where they break, not just how to call the API.
• Experience taking a product from zero to a working first version in an environment with incomplete information and no dedicated team.
• Excellent written and verbal communication. You'll be the connective tissue between technical execution and business stakeholders who don't share your context by default.
• Autonomy and ownership.
• Authorized to work in the United States and able to work on‑site in Culver City, CA.

• Experience with robotics, humanoids, embodied AI, or IoT and connected devices.
• Comfort with hardware‑adjacent work: edge deployment, audio pipelines, sensors, on‑device inference.
• Experience working alongside distributed engineering teams.
• Early‑stage startup background
• Product instinct: you have opinions about what should be built, not just how.
• Background in a technical discipline (CS,…