Founding Robotics Research Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

Founding Robotics Research Engineer

About Us

We are reimagining manufacturing through advanced robotics. Our mission is to rebuild the American manufacturing industry as an AI-first, assembly-focused, dual-use contract manufacturer. We aim to empower manufacturers with intelligent, efficient, and adaptable robotic systems that redefine productivity and quality. As a founding member of our engineering team, you will have a direct and significant impact on our product, culture, and ultimate success. This role is 100% in-person at our office in the mission, SF.

The Role

We are hiring a Founding Robotics Research Engineer to design, implement, and deploy intelligent robotic systems for manufacturing.

This is not a purely academic role — and not a generic software role. You will work across:

• ROS2-based system architecture

• Manipulation and navigation

• Perception and VLA-based control

• Traditional controls fused with learned methods

• On-site deployment in production manufacturing workcells

You should be equally comfortable reading robotics papers, tuning controllers, debugging sensor calibration, and pushing production code to robots running on a factory floor.

Key Responsibilities

Robotics Systems & Architecture

• Design and implement distributed robotic systems in ROS2

• Build modular autonomy stacks for manipulation and mobile platforms

• Own system-level performance, latency, and reliability

Robotics Foundation Models (VLA)

• Develop and integrate Vision–Language–Action models for robotic control

• Design data collection pipelines and fine-tune foundation models for assembly tasks

• Benchmark and evaluate real-world performance

Controls + Learning

• Fuse traditional control with learned policies

• Implement hybrid perception–planning–control architectures

• Improve robustness, repeatability, and safety in physical systems

Manipulation, Navigation & Deployment

• Develop algorithms for dexterous manipulation and industrial navigation

• Ship systems from prototype to production

• Debug real-world edge cases (lighting, calibration drift, wear, latency) and maintain deployed robotic cells

What We're Looking For

Deployment Mentality

• Experience shipping systems into real environments (not just lab demos)

• Comfort debugging hardware–software integration issues

• Ability to own systems end-to-end

Ownership

• Thrives in high-velocity, ambiguous environments

• Takes full technical ownership of complex systems

• Willing to get into the weeds of mechanical, electrical, and software challenges

Nice to Have

• PhD in Robotics or related field

• Experience working on dual-use or DoD-related systems

• Ability to obtain a government security clearance

• Experience with safety-critical robotic systems

Growth Opportunities

• Define the technical direction of robotics foundation model deployment in manufacturing

• Build and lead the autonomy team

• Shape the next generation of AI-driven assembly systems

• Become a core technical interface with defense and industrial partners

Why Join Us?

This is one of the only places where world-class manufacturing operators, mechanical engineers, robotics researchers, and software engineers sit in the same room — building production systems together.

We are committed to being deeply embedded in the U.S. industrial base. Our focus is simple: build adaptive robotic assembly systems that make American manufacturing scalable, resilient, and competitive again.

If you want to publish papers, this may not be the role.

If you want to build and deploy the systems those papers were meant to enable — this is it.