Robot Software Engineer; Platform and Backend

Robot Software Engineer (Platform and Backend)

Oakland, CA (In Person Only)

Full-time

First, the good news:
The world now has over 1.7 terawatts of cumulative solar capacity and solar PV is the lowest-cost source of energy generation worldwide.

The challenge:
The world must build 3 terawatts of new solar capacity every year for the next 25 years.

Planted is creating new technology to overhaul how the industry develops and builds solar power resources. And we need help. We're expanding our team of ambitious, curious, and hands-on engineers and operators. Come own large parts of product, company, or business development and help power the world with 100% clean energy.

As a key member of our Robot Software team, you will design, build, and operate the backbone that keeps our robot fleet online, secure, and productive, owning backend services and APIs for telemetry, data ingest, command and control, and user workflows while bringing up compute with operating systems, drivers, firmware, and device configuration, and creating fleet scale CI/CD that produces reproducible edge images and cloud releases.

You will run deployments end to end with safe over the air updates, staged rollouts, health checks, automated rollback, and device configuration while operating and securing cloud infrastructure across compute, storage, networking, private connectivity, and secrets. You are a platform generalist who moves smoothly between Python services, device provisioning, infrastructure automation, and incident response, and you jump into the highest priority gaps to ship outcomes quickly and safely.

This position offers the opportunity to collaborate closely with a highly skilled cross-functional engineering team, taking ownership of projects from ideation to implementation to enhance the usability and reliability of our robotic systems in challenging real-world environments.

The salary range for this full-time position is $130,000 - $175,000 plus stock options and benefits. Pay within the range is based on candidate experience, job-specific skills, education, and work location. The target experience for the position is 3 - 7+ years

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Develop and maintain backend services/APIs for robot telemetry, data ingest, command/control, and user workflows
• Bring up compute hardware (x86/ARM/Jetson): OS provisioning, drivers/firmware, and device configuration
• Create and run fleet-scale CI/CD pipelines; manage artifacts, versioning, and reproducible builds for edge images and cloud services (containers, cross-compilation)
• Manage robot fleet deployments
  : safe OTA updates (A/B), staged rollouts, health checks, automated rollback, and device configuration
• Operate and secure cloud infrastructure
  : manage compute, storage, networking, VPNs, security controls, and secrets
• Administer and monitor data systems: manage databases and message systems; build observability with logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, alerting, and clear SLOs with runbooks
• Ensure security and reliability of our cloud and robot systems
• Conduct hands‑on testing of edge software and system integrations in the field and our testing yard to validate reliability
• Work like a startup generalist across edge, cloud, data, and infra; jump into the highest‑priority gaps to ship outcomes quickly and safely

QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in CS or equivalent
• 3 - 7 years of professional experience in software development
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and teamwork abilities
• Experienced in using Python 3.10+ for backend development, data infrastructure, and automation
• Experience managing IoT deployments or robot fleets
• Experience creating and operating CI/CD pipelines
• Familiarity working in Docker containers and container deployment
• Well-versed with developing software for Linux environments
• Adept at writing Bash scripts for automation and system management
• Knowledgeable of SQL and database management
• Excellent problem‑solving and analytical skills
• Curious demeanor and excited to learn new technologies when necessary
• Prioritizes delivering user value while making pragmatic technical tradeoffs
• Comfortable working as a generalist: spanning multiple…