Founding Robotics Engineer — Real-World Robot AI (Seattle)

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

Job summary

Reflection Robotics Inc. is seeking a founding team member who can bridge research, engineering, and production work. You will train and deploy robot foundation models, optimize for real-time control and reliability, and debug hardware-driven failures on the robot itself.

You’ll decide when learning-based approaches are appropriate and contribute to shaping the product and team from the ground up. You will work directly in Seattle with customers in real manufacturing environments, wearing

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Experience training and deploying ML models (robotics, computer vision, or similar).
• Comfort in debugging real systems, hardware included, not just code in isolation.
• A track record of solving problems pragmatically.
• 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 model training & deployment

Hardware debugging

Pragmatic problem solving

Ambition to tackle hard problems

In-person Seattle work

Job description

Reflection Robotics Inc. is seeking a founding team member who can bridge research, engineering, and production work. You will train and deploy robot foundation models, optimize for real-time control and reliability, and debug hardware-driven failures on the robot itself.

You’ll decide when learning-based approaches are appropriate and contribute to shaping the product and team from the ground up. You will work directly in Seattle with customers in real manufacturing environments, wearing