Founding Robotics Engineer, Perception & VLA

About the Role

This is a founding role, and you'll build this part of the product from the ground up with the founding team. There isn't a large existing codebase waiting for you. The perception team recently lost a member, and we need someone who wants to build the next version from scratch, set the technical approach, and operate with a high degree of independence.

Your work runs through the full model lifecycle: perception pipelines, VLA models, pre-training, fine-tuning, deployment, and post-training optimization all the way to inference. For us, a model is done when it works on the floor, not when the eval curve looks good.

Why You'll Want This Job

You set the direction. You'll own the perception and learning stack and decide how we improve and build it.
Your work goes live fast. Our customers' warehouses are our lab, so your models get tested in real operations in months, not years.
Startup speed. Small team, fast decisions. If you can make the case for something, you can start building it that week.
You grow as we grow. Your scope expands with every new task, robot, and customer, alongside founders who have scaled robotics before.
Founding equity and a real stake in where the company goes.

What You'll Own

Perception: 3D scene understanding (RGB-D fusion, point clouds, segmentation), 6-DOF pose estimation for products and cases, and zero-shot identification with vision-language models.
VLA models: Vision-language-action models as the backbone of how our robots carry out tasks, including pre-training, fine-tuning, and synthetic data in simulation.
Deployment: Models running on real robots within tight latency and compute limits, plus an active learning loop that turns floor mistakes into better models.
Data and teleoperation: Teleoperation setup, data collection, and the pipeline from raw recordings to clean, versioned training data.

Your First Month

Get to know our robots, simulation environment, and customer floors, then write the perception and learning plan you want to bet on. By the end of the month, you'll have a first model running on a physical robot doing a real task.

What You Bring

3 to 5 years of hands-on work in robotics, computer vision, or ML, ideally on physical robots
Hands-on model training on GPUs and experience shipping models to production inference under latency constraints
3D perception experience with point clouds and depth cameras
Experience deploying on real robot hardware and working in simulation (MuJoCo, Isaac Sim, or similar)
Strong Python and C++ (or a similar systems language)
A habit of getting physical prototypes working in weeks, not months

Nice to Have

VLA or manipulation policy training
Zero-shot pose estimation or segmentation
Grasp planning, learned or geometric
Warehouse or logistics automation experience