Robot Perception Engineer

Department: Software

Location: Mountain View

Compensation: $175K – $280K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

At Rhoda AI, we’re building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. We own the full robotics stack from high-performance hardware and robot systems to the infrastructure and state-of-the-art foundation world models that control our robots. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling long-tail edge cases, made possible by our cutting edge research and end-to-end system design. We've raised over $450M and are investing aggressively in model research, infrastructure, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make generalist robotics a reality.

We're looking for a Robot Perception Engineer to develop and maintain the perception systems that give our humanoid robots a real-time understanding of the world around them. You'll own the software that transforms raw sensor data into reliable, actionable perception — from sensor integration and calibration to safety-certified object detection and streaming data to our foundation models and teleoperation stack.

What You'll Do

• Develop and maintain real-time perception pipelines — integrating and calibrating sensors (cameras, LiDAR, IMUs, depth sensors) with our humanoid robot platforms

• Build and optimize object detection, tracking, and scene understanding systems for safe operation in complex, unstructured environments

• Own the streaming infrastructure that delivers sensor data reliably to foundation models, teleoperation systems, and onboard control stacks

• Work closely with the AI/ML team to bridge perception outputs and learned policy inputs — ensuring low-latency, high-reliability data delivery

• Implement and validate safety-certified perception components, including object detection and collision avoidance, to meet real-world deployment requirements

• Support bring-up and field testing of new camera hardware and sensor configurations

• Contribute to system reliability, fault detection, and recovery logic for robust real-world perception

What We're Looking For

• 4+ years of experience in robotics perception, computer vision, or a closely related field

• Strong software engineering fundamentals in C++, Python, or Rust

• Hands-on experience with sensor integration and calibration (cameras, LiDAR, IMUs, depth sensors)

• Experience building real-time perception pipelines on embedded or edge compute platforms

• Familiarity with streaming and networking systems for low-latency sensor data transport

• Experience with ROS/ROS2 or similar robotics middleware in production or research contexts

• Ability to debug across the full stack — from driver-level sensor issues to perception behavior on live hardware

Nice to Have (But Not Required)

• Experience with safety-certified or safety-critical perception systems (e.g., ISO 26262, IEC 61508, or similar)

• Background in multi-sensor fusion and calibration for robust perception under real-world conditions

• Familiarity with teleoperation systems and the latency and reliability constraints they impose

• Experience deploying and optimizing perception models on edge or onboard compute (quantization, TensorRT, etc.)

• Familiarity with humanoid or legged robot platforms and the unique perception challenges they present

• Prior work on early-stage hardware programs (prototype or pre-production robots)

Why This Role

• Your perception stack is the robot's eyes — the software you write directly determines what our humanoids can see, understand, and safely interact with in the real world

• Work at the boundary of hardware and AI, integrating state-of-the-art sensors and learned perception models onto real robotic systems

• High ownership in a small, fast-moving team where your contributions shape how the next generation of humanoid robots perceive and navigate the world