Founding Software Engineer, Robotics — Real-Time Pipelines

Gradient Robotics; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Gradient Robotics is hiring a Founding Software Engineer in San Francisco to own the end-to-end data path from AI models to actuators. You will work close to hardware, from kernel and firmware up through controls and perception, building real-time pipelines with millisecond latency.

You’ll shape the software stack to keep vision inference, control loops, and actuation on a single clock, ensuring determinism and high performance for the autonomous robotics platform.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering near hardware (drivers, kernels, embedded, robotics).
• Proficient in Rust, Python or C++, with strong multithreading skills.
• Experience with real-time or deterministic systems in robotics.
• Familiarity with Bazel, Nix, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience with Linux kernel hacking and embedded platforms.

Responsibilities

• Ship performance-critical code to real robots daily.
• Own the full data flow: camera frames, perception, planning, and actuators.
• Maintain deterministic real-time control loops alongside vision inference.
• Develop low-latency perception data paths for high-bandwidth streams.
• Reduce latency across the stack and increase system reliability.
• Build tooling and instrumentation to observe and debug real-time behavior.

Skills

Rust

Python

C++

Multithreading

Embedded systems

Tools

Bazel

Nix

CI/CD

Linux kernel hacking

Embedded Linux

DPDK

SPDK

io_uring

eBPF

ftrace

flamegraphs

Job description

Gradient Robotics is hiring a Founding Software Engineer in San Francisco to own the end-to-end data path from AI models to actuators. You will work close to hardware, from kernel and firmware up through controls and perception, building real-time pipelines with millisecond latency.

You’ll shape the software stack to keep vision inference, control loops, and actuation on a single clock, ensuring determinism and high performance for the autonomous robotics platform.