Principal software engineer, embodied systems

Principal Software Engineer, Embodied Systems

Mundane is a venture-backed seed-stage robot learning startup founded by a team of Stanford researchers and builders. We’re deploying a massive fleet of humanoid robots to perform mundane tasks in commercial environments, collecting data to build the next generation of embodied intelligence. We’re a fast-paced, execution-driven team of engineers, roboticists, and dreamers.

As a Principal Software Engineer on the Embodied Systems team
, you’ll architect and build the core software that powers our humanoid robots — from real-time control loops to safety systems, teleoperation pipelines, distributed middleware, and fleet-level infrastructure.

You’ll partner closely with controls, perception, hardware, and teleoperation engineers to design and implement high-reliability systems that operate under real-world constraints. This is a deeply hands-on technical role where you will write production-grade code, lead systems design, set engineering standards, and own mission-critical components of the robot stack.

Your work will directly determine how fast we learn, how reliably we deploy, and how our robots behave in dynamic environments. You’ll shape the architecture that allows humanoid robots to scale from dozens to hundreds to thousands.

• Architect, develop, and own core components of the humanoid control, teleoperation, safety, and middleware stack.
• Design high-performance distributed systems for robot-to-cloud communication, telemetry, and remote operation.
• Lead system-wide architectural decisions across ROS2 nodes, message interfaces, networking, and real-time pipelines.
• Build reliable software integrations across hardware, firmware, sensors, actuators, and cloud infrastructure.
• Develop tools for debugging, monitoring, logging, and replay that accelerate iteration for the entire engineering team.
• Collaborate with ML, controls, and perception teams to integrate new models and ensure stable deployment.
• Drive code quality, testing rigor, safety enforcement, and production-readiness across all robot systems.
• Mentor and technically guide engineers across the stack — raising the bar on design, reliability, and execution.
• Contribute to robot bring-up, field testing, and fleet-level diagnostics to validate system performance at scale.
• Establish best practices for system reliability, fault tolerance, crash recovery, and latency reduction.

• 8+ years of experience as a software engineer working on robotics, real-time systems, or distributed systems.
• Expert proficiency in C++ and Python, with a track record of owning production systems end-to-end.
• Deep familiarity with ROS2, middleware architectures, message passing, and distributed control.
• Strong understanding of hardware/software integration, real-time communication, network architecture, and telemetry.
• Experience building fault-tolerant, low-latency, system-critical software for autonomous systems or robots.
• Ability to lead architectural direction and guide multi-disciplinary engineering teams.
• Exceptional debugging skills — across logs, bag files, hardware interfaces, and real-world robot behavior.

• Experience with VR teleoperation, WebRTC/SRT, or low-latency streaming pipelines.
• Background in controls, motion planning, state estimation, or sensor fusion.
• Familiarity with ML inference tooling or robot learning frameworks.
• Experience running robots in production environments or supporting large-scale deployments.

• Ownership of the core software stack powering humanoid robots in the real world.
• A leadership role shaping architecture, standards, and long-term technical direction.
• Early equity with meaningful upside in a venture-backed robotics company.
• The ability to push capabilities to live robots in weeks, not quarters.
• Deep exposure to every layer of embodied intelligence — hardware, controls, perception, ML, teleop, and fleet systems.
• A chance to define the foundations of how humanoid robots operate at scale.