Founding Robotics Engineer
$170,000 - $230,000
New York
This role will require substantial travel to different customers' sites and warehouses.
About the company
We're supporting a seed-stage warehouse robotics startup. Their software is already running in large enterprise operations. Now they're building the AI that lets each robot recognize products and handle them on its own. The founders have built and scaled robotics teams before.
The role
This is a founding engineering role. You'll lead perception and robot learning and make the key technical decisions. There's no large legacy codebase, so you'll design the approach yourself and build it with the founding team. Success means models that work reliably on live warehouse floors.
What you'll own
- Perception: 3D scene understanding with depth cameras and point clouds, object pose estimation, and identifying new products without retraining
- Robot learning: Training and fine-tuning vision-language-action models, using simulation and synthetic data
- Deployment: Running models on real robots within tight speed and compute limits, and feeding real-world mistakes back into training
- Data: Teleoperation, data collection, and the pipeline that turns raw recordings into clean training data
Why it's worth a look
- You'll set the technical direction for perception and learning
- Your models get tested in real customer operations within months
- A small team that makes decisions quickly
- Your scope grows with every new robot, task and customer
- Founding equity
What you'll bring
- 3 to 5 years of hands-on work in robotics, computer vision or ML, ideally on physical robots
- Experience training models on GPUs and deploying them where speed matters
- 3D perception experience with point clouds and depth cameras
- Experience with real robot hardware and simulation (MuJoCo, Isaac Sim or similar)
- Strong Python, plus C++ or another systems language
- You like getting prototypes working quickly
Nice to have
- Training manipulation or vision-language-action policies
- Zero-shot pose estimation or segmentation
- Grasp planning
- Warehouse or logistics automation experience
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