API Platform Engineer for General-Purpose Robotics

Emploive; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Physical Intelligence seeks an API Product Engineer to build the developer surface that enables other companies to use Pi’s models—bring data, fine‑tune, evaluate, and run low‑latency inference in their environments.

You’ll own this end‑to-end experience, turning capabilities into a scalable platform that supports thousands of partners and potentially millions of robots, collaborating with researchers and engineers across AI, infra, and external partners.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building production systems.
• Deep backend and systems experience across APIs, services, databases, caching, distributed systems, and infrastructure.
• Experience building and scaling developer platforms for model fine-tuning, inference, or compute-intensive workloads.
• Understanding of scaling challenges: reliability, latency, multi-tenancy, versioning, observability, and ops complexity.
• Familiarity with deploying, serving, and debugging ML models in production; not required to be an ML researcher.
• Strong Python skills and ability to work across infrastructure and product boundaries.
• High ownership: ability to tackle ambiguity, deliver end-to-end, then design scalable systems.

Responsibilities

• Build Pi’s model API end to end, including data ingestion, fine‑tuning, evaluation, low‑latency inference, partner tooling, and deployment integrations.
• Design systems scalable to thousands of partners and potentially millions of robots.
• Architect multi‑tenant infrastructure with rate limiting, isolation, backpressure, versioning, observability, and SLOs.
• Turn partner data into a first‑class product experience from upload to validation, processing, fine‑tuning, and evaluation.
• Build and operate low‑latency inference systems for real‑world robots.
• Collaborate with researchers to turn new model capabilities into stable, usable product surfaces.
• Learn from partner usage to improve APIs, tooling, documentation, and abstractions.
• Write high‑quality production code deeply integrated with Pi’s infrastructure.
• Define the developer platform for general‑purpose robotics, when no playbook exists.

Skills

Software engineering

Backend systems

APIs & services

Distributed systems

Python

Developer platforms

System scalability

Observability

Tools

Postgres

ClickHouse

GCP

Kubernetes

Modal

React

TypeScript

Job description

Physical Intelligence seeks an API Product Engineer to build the developer surface that enables other companies to use Pi’s models—bring data, fine‑tune, evaluate, and run low‑latency inference in their environments.

You’ll own this end‑to-end experience, turning capabilities into a scalable platform that supports thousands of partners and potentially millions of robots, collaborating with researchers and engineers across AI, infra, and external partners.