Software Engineer, Robotics, Python

Robotics Software Engineer (Python / C++ / ROS2) | Physical AI | [Menlo Park, onsite]

I'm hiring for a venture-backed robotics company automating physical work in a large legacy industry that has barely changed in decades.

They're building an autonomous robotic handling system that takes a slow, manual, physically punishing process and makes it automatic. Pilots are launching now, demand from major international customers is outpacing what the team can build, and they're more than doubling engineering as a result.

This is a genuinely early team. You'd be one of the first ten employees, working directly alongside a founding group with backgrounds across top robotics and aerospace companies, and owning real surface area from day one.

• Build software for an autonomous robotic package handling system alongside software, electrical and mechanical engineers
• Design, implement and debug across the full stack: motion control, perception pipelines and hardware interfaces for robotic manipulation
• Write clean, efficient Python and C++ with a real emphasis on maintainability and performance
• Own software quality through rigorous testing, root-cause debugging and performance validation on live hardware
• Write with safety-critical operation in mind: fault detection, graceful degradation and fail-safe behaviors for physical robots
• Bring up and validate software on physical hardware, including issues that straddle the software and hardware boundary
• Instrument systems with logging, metrics and alerting so production issues get diagnosed fast
• Drive improvements to the stack, tooling and CI/CD to speed the whole team up
• Bring cutting-edge robotics advances into the system where they'll make a difference
• Use AI-assisted development tools and coding agents to move faster

• BS or higher in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Robotics or a closely related field
• Strong Python and C++
• Hands‑on ROS2 experience
• Demonstrated experience shipping production software on a deployed robot system
• Excellent problem solving, working independently and in fast-moving teams
• Genuine appetite for hard robotics problems and systems that work in the real world
• Comfort in an early‑stage environment: moving fast, wearing several hats, iterating on systems already in deployment

• Training, evaluating and integrating learned policies for vacuum‑based manipulators
• Perception and scene understanding for grasping in complex or dynamic environments
• Motion planning and low‑level motor control on BLDC or stepper hardware
• CAN bus in embedded or robotic systems
• Docker, containerization and embedded Linux in resource‑constrained deployments

• Biased toward action and comfortable taking initiative
• Gritty, learns fast, teaches those around them
• Calm when things get chaotic
• Low ego, gives and takes feedback well

• Competitive pay plus early‑stage equity, backed by investors with multiple successful robotics exits
• 401k with a generous company match
• Company‑sponsored health and dental
• Unlimited vacation
• Dinner covered when you're working late