Founding Robotics Engineer: ML + Real-World Systems

Reflection Robotics; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Reflection Robotics is seeking a founding team member to shape the future of our robotics platform. You’ll work across research, engineering, and production, turning data into real-time control systems and production-ready solutions on customer sites.

You will balance learning-based approaches with solid engineering, applying data-driven methods when they make sense and inventing new tech when needed, all while collaborating closely with a small, hands-on team in Seattle.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Experience training and deploying ML models (robotics, computer vision, or similar).
• Comfort debugging real systems, hardware included, not just code in isolation.
• Ambition to tackle challenging, open-ended problems in a fast-paced environment.
• Ability to work in-person in Seattle on weekdays.

Responsibilities

• Train and iterate on robot foundation models, from data collection through deployment
• Optimize models for robot throughput, inference speed, and reliability
• Debug failures directly on hardware by going beyond logs and metrics to understand what’s happening physically
• Decide when a problem needs a learned solution versus a classical engineering one, and build the latter when it’s the better call
• Generate insights that actually change what the team builds next
• Work directly with customers’ real manufacturing environments and constraints
• Collaborate closely with a small team where everyone touches research, infra, and hardware

Skills

Software engineering fundamentals

ML models training & deployment

Hardware debugging

Open-ended problem solving

Seattle in-person work

Job description

Reflection Robotics is seeking a founding team member to shape the future of our robotics platform. You’ll work across research, engineering, and production, turning data into real-time control systems and production-ready solutions on customer sites.

You will balance learning-based approaches with solid engineering, applying data-driven methods when they make sense and inventing new tech when needed, all while collaborating closely with a small, hands-on team in Seattle.