Robotics Platform Engineer - SF​/Oakland

Formic is on a mission to reshape American manufacturing by making automation accessible to every factory. As labor constraints rise, costs increase, and global competition intensifies, automation is no longer optional for manufacturers that want to stay competitive.

We deliver automation through a Robotics-as-a-Service model that combines industrial robotics, proprietary software, and full-service support into a single, integrated solution. By removing the traditional barriers of cost, complexity, and risk, we enable manufacturers to deploy automation quickly and realize measurable gains in throughput, safety, and operational efficiency without large upfront capital investment.

Backed by leading investors including Lux Capital, Initialized Capital, Blackhorn Ventures, and Mitsubishi HC Capital North America, Formic is scaling rapidly and building the foundation for a new era of high-performance, Made in America production.

The Software Engineering Team builds and operates the systems that power Formic’s Robotics-as-a-Service platform. The team develops the monitoring, provisioning, and data infrastructure that enables real‑time visibility across a growing fleet of deployed industrial robotic systems. Engineering ensures systems are observable, resilient, and remotely diagnosable at scale by building production‑grade edge and cloud systems that support reliable data collection, remote troubleshooting, live video streaming, and continuous system improvement.

This work directly impacts fleet uptime, service efficiency, and customer outcomes.

Within Engineering, Formic is launching a brand‑new Advanced Robotics Team focused on building next‑generation intelligent robotic systems designed to operate in real industrial environments. This team will develop wheeled humanoids and advanced mobile manipulation platforms, pushing beyond classical robotics stacks into modern embodied AI systems.

Formic is uniquely positioned to do this. We already operate hundreds of deployed robotic systems and maintain production‑grade deployment, monitoring, and fleet infrastructure across real manufacturing customers. This provides what most humanoid startups do not: continuous real‑world data, production testing environments, and a clear path from research to scaled deployment.

This is not a demo lab. We are building learning‑driven robotic systems that operate daily in real factories.

As a Robotics Platform Engineer, you will design and maintain the distributed software architecture that powers Formic’s next‑generation robotic platforms. You will build the infrastructure that connects simulation, training, deployment, monitoring, and real‑world execution into a unified production system. This role sits at the core of embodied AI deployment. You will ensure our robotic systems are reproducible, observable, scalable, and reliable across both simulation and physical hardware environments.

• Design and maintain distributed robotics software architecture across edge and cloud environments
• Build middleware and data pipelines supporting real‑time robotic systems
• Develop logging, replay, and observability tools for debugging and performance analysis
• Build scalable data infrastructure to support AI training and dataset management
• Implement model versioning, deployment, and rollback systems for robotic policies
• Optimize performance and latency across distributed compute nodes
• Develop CI/CD pipelines for simulation, hardware testing, and production releases
• Enable reproducible experiments across simulation and real‑world deployments
• Support integration between perception, control, and learning subsystems

• 5+ years of experience in robotics software, autonomous systems, or high‑performance distributed systems
• Strong C++ and systems programming expertise
• Experience with ROS2, DDS, and real‑time Linux environments
• Experience building distributed, latency‑sensitive, or high‑performance systems
• Familiarity with GPU compute environments and ML training pipelines
• Strong Dev Ops, CI/CD, and infrastructure automation experience
• Experience supporting production‑grade systems beyond…