Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Robotics Platform

Team: Autonomy

Location: Irvine, CA

Commitment: Full time

Workplace Type: onsite

What You'll Get to Do

Architect the software platform for physical AI—the foundation on which our autonomy runs across legged robots, ground vehicles, humanoids, and future embodiments
Define the interfaces and contracts between major subsystems, and steward them as versioned, well-documented APIs that internal teams and external partners can depend on
Design the abstractions that describe a robot’s capabilities, state, and intent, creating a consistent contract between on-robot autonomy and higher-level systems such as dashboards, autonomous agents, mission planners, and fleet-management platforms
Develop mechanisms for discovering and tracking robot capabilities dynamically as hardware, software, sensors, and autonomy modules change, enabling higher-level systems to determine what missions and behaviors a particular robot can support
Drive abstractions that decouple our intelligence from specific robots, sensors, compute platforms, and communication architectures, accelerating integration onto new embodiments
Own platform performance end to end, from real-time execution on the robot through distributed communication and cloud connectivity, and establish the standards for latency, throughput, resource utilization, and reliability in the field
Build and evolve the middleware and runtime infrastructure that moves high-bandwidth sensor data, model inputs and outputs, commands, and state throughout the system
Develop tools and methodologies for profiling, tracing, benchmarking, and understanding system behavior across simulation and physical hardware
Partner with autonomy, hardware, simulation, infrastructure, product, and deployment teams to identify systemic bottlenecks and turn recurring integration problems into reusable platform capabilities
Set the technical direction for platform engineering at FieldAI: write designs, build consensus across teams, raise the engineering bar through review and mentorship, and help grow the team

What You Have

Education: B.S. or higher in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
Experience: 8+ years building production robotics or systems software, including hands-on ownership of platform, framework, or infrastructure software that other engineering teams built on top of
Distributed robotic systems: experience architecting distributed systems involving multiple autonomous agents, processes, computers, or robots, with a strong understanding of the failure modes that emerge outside controlled environments
Deep ROS 2 and middleware expertise: fluency well beyond application-level use, with a strong command of the distributed systems fundamentals underneath—pub/sub and RPC semantics, quality of service, serialization, discovery, transport, and how these behave on constrained compute and imperfect networks
Robot capability and intent modeling: experience designing abstractions that describe what a robot can do, what resources or capabilities are currently available, and what the robot is trying to accomplish. You understand how these contracts support higher-level systems such as dashboards, agents, mission planners, and fleet-management platforms
API and abstraction design: a track record of designing versioned interfaces, frameworks, or SDKs that evolved successfully across multiple consumers. Public examples such as open-source interface packages, SDKs, specifications, design proposals, or standards contributions are a strong plus
Modern C++ and Python: expert-level proficiency, with a strong commitment to writing code and libraries that other engineers can understand, extend, and depend on
Systems and performance engineering: experience with Linux on embedded or edge compute, profiling and tracing, concurrency, memory and compute constraints, and techniques for high-throughput, low-latency data movement
Production track record: software you have written or architected running on real hardware in production, along with the operational judgment that comes from deploying it, debugging failures in the field, and supporting the teams and customers who depend on it
Judgment and independence: ability to take an ambiguous, cross-team technical problem, determine the right scope and tradeoffs, and drive it to a shipped outcome with minimal direction
Communication and collaboration: able to write design documents that create alignment, navigate teams with competing priorities, and deliver systems incrementally rather than holding out for a theoretically perfect architecture

The Extras That Set You Apart

Hands-on robotics experience: experience developing, integrating, or deploying software on quadrupeds, humanoids, manipulators, autonomous vehicles, or other complex robotic platforms
Robotics middleware: familiarity with communication technologies such as Zenoh, DDS, and MQTT, including their tradeoffs for distributed and resource-constrained systems
Rust: experience building production systems software in Rust, particularly for networking, middleware, embedded, or performance-sensitive applications
Real-time and embedded systems: experience with real-time Linux, embedded compute platforms, hardware interfaces, device drivers, or resource-constrained edge systems
Simulation and hardware-in-the-loop: experience building workflows that span simulation, software-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop, and validation on physical robots
Fleet and mission systems: experience designing interfaces between robots and higher-level systems such as fleet managers, mission planners, dashboards, or autonomous agents
Cloud-to-edge systems: experience designing systems that bridge on-robot software with cloud services while accounting for intermittent connectivity, bandwidth limitations, and degraded network conditions
Observability and performance tooling: experience building or using tracing, profiling, telemetry, and benchmarking infrastructure to understand complex distributed robotic systems
Open-source and standards: meaningful contributions to robotics, middleware, distributed-systems, or interface standards through open-source projects, specifications, or technical working groups