Staff Software Engineer - Full Stack

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

Our Mission

Expand human ambition in the physical world.

Critical infrastructure is constrained by labor shortages, hazardous working conditions, and operational complexity. Watney builds and deploys autonomous robotic systems that increase the speed and capacity of buildout, starting with data centers.

About the Role

At Watney, full stack engineers own our software ecosystem end-to-end, meaning you will regularly cross the boundary between high-throughput backend infrastructure, enterprise customer platforms, and highly interactive web frontend interfaces. As we rapidly scale production deployments and robotics capabilities, you will have deep technical ownership of the design and development of our off-robot systems.

We are looking for someone who wants to build an end-to-end type-safe stack with Rust on the backend. We highly value production Rust experience, but we value core engineering talent even more; if you are a strong systems or polyglot engineer eager to learn Rust, we will give you the runway and support to master it idiomatic to our pipeline.

What You’ll Do

• Own the Core Platforms: Drive end-to-end development for video-heavy annotation platforms, VR teleoperation interfaces, and secure customer portals.

• Architect Off-Robot Systems: Build cloud infrastructure, load balancing, and high-throughput pipelines to ingest and process petabyte-scale telemetry streams in real time.

• Lead Live Operations: Maintain code cleanliness through rigorous integration testing while managing live systems via OpenTelemetry (OTEL) tracking.

You May Be a Good Fit If You:

• Have deep professional full-stack experience spanning highly scalable distributed cloud infrastructure, media/video streaming pipelines, or complex rendering systems.

• Bring production experience with Rust, or possess a strong C++/functional programming background (Haskell, LISP) enabling you to master idiomatic Rust quickly.

• Have experience operating software at the intersection of physical hardware, complex simulations, or autonomous vehicles.

We’re committed to building a diverse, inclusive team. At Watney Robotics, we welcome people of all backgrounds and identities, and we make hiring decisions based on skills, experience, and potential. If you’re passionate about robotics but don’t meet every requirement, we still encourage you to apply!

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