Member of Technical Staff, Robotics Software

Industrial Next (YC W22); San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity

Relocation support

Comprehensive benefits

Learn from team

Equal opportunity

Job summary

IndustrialNext in San Francisco is seeking a Member of Technical Staff, Robotics Software to drive the workflow from research policies to shipped products. You will work across manipulation, perception, and teleoperation with a research team to deliver real-world robotics capabilities.

The role requires 3–5+ years shipping robotics software on real robots, strong motion planning and ROS/ROS2 skills, and hands-on experience with multiple industrial arm SDKs.

Qualifications

• BS in CS/CSE/Robotics; MS or PhD a plus.
• 3–5+ years shipping robotics software on real robots, from prototype to shipping.
• Experience with motion planning and manipulation primitives.
• Middleware fluency: ROS / ROS2 or equivalent.
• Model integration with observability; production-ready policies.
• System-integration debugging across hardware, sensors, ML and control.
• Industrial arm SDK fluency: Flexiv, Aubo, UR, Franka, KUKA or equivalent.
• Sim-first workflow using IsaacSim, MuJoCo, or equivalent.

Responsibilities

• Build the workflow and motion stack between research-trained policies and shipping product.
• Integrate perception, policy, motion, and control into reliable systems meeting customer requirements.
• Bring up new tasks quickly across manipulation, perception, and teleoperation.

Skills

Robotics software

Motion planning

ROS / ROS2

System integration

Teleoperation tooling

Simulation (IsaacSim)

Industrial SDKs

Education

BS in CS/CSE/Robotics

MS/PhD a plus

Tools

IsaacSim

MuJoCo

Flexiv SDK

Aubo SDK

UR/Franka/KUKA SDKs

Job description

About IndustrialNext

We envision a world where no manual labor is required to build anything and everything we want.

A Safe world with abundant creativity.

We're building a rapidly scalable, high-performing robotic system for fully autonomous factories. We deliver across multiple embodiments - bimanual / single-arm stations, wheeled humanoids, and mobile manipulators - on a shared stack. Every task we ship has to hit ≥99% success at human or industrial-automation cycle time.

Physical AI is moving fast. Academia and research-focused startups have shown promising early results, but very few have shipped robots that work at industrial precision, speed, and reliability. We have, and that gap is our work.

We invite highly talented AI and robotics engineers excited to join a hyper-scaling startup. You'll work tirelessly to ship first products to early customers while building the foundation models and robots to reshape global manufacturing.

What we believe

1. Real-world deployment beats paper benchmarks. Our bar is what runs at customer cycle time with high success rate and dexterity. Every shift, for months and years.
2. Commercialized Data Flywheel is critical for Scalable Foundation Models. We’re not waiting until our foundation model is ready. We build and deploy working robots, while also building a data pipeline to feed into our foundation model.
3. Hardware iteration speed is a moat. Custom grippers, mobile platforms, and data rigs at production runs of dozens to hundreds. Moving fast from hardware design to deployment is what wins.

Role: Member of Technical Staff, Robotics Software

Why this role matters

You'll work across Manipulation, Perception, and Teleoperation, partnering closely with Research team to ship a real product using state-of-the-art research.

What you’ll do

• Build the workflow and motion stack between research-trained policies and shipping product.
• Integrate perception, policy, motion, and control into reliable systems that meets customer requirements.
• Bring up new tasks fast across manipulation, perception, and teleoperation.

Required

• Education. BS in CS / CSE / Robotics; MS or PhD a plus.
• Experience. 3-5+ years shipping robotics software on real robots in production - owned a system from prototype to shipping.
• Motion planning and manipulation primitives. Hands-on experience across various motion planning and control algorithms.
• Middleware fluency. ROS / ROS2 or equivalent.
• Model integration with observability. Ships learned models and policies into production.
• System-integration debugging. When the failure could be hardware, sensors, ML, or control, you can localize it and either fix it or hand off cleanly.
• Strongly preferred
• Customer-facing demos and products at industrial reliability.
• Mobile-manipulator platforms - wheeled humanoid, mobile base + arm coordination.
• Custom hardware bring-up (sensors, end-effectors, actuators).
• Performance optimization - real-time loops, parallelism, pipelining.
• Cross-disciplinary fluency - robotics, controls, ML.
• Sim-first workflow (IsaacSim, MuJoCo, or equivalent) for validation and synthetic data.
• Teleop and internal tooling. Built or extended teleop pipelines, data-collection tools, task-validation harnesses, and the regression suites that keep the stack healthy at scale.
• Industrial arm SDK fluency - Flexiv, Aubo, Universal Robots, Franka, KUKA, or equivalent.
• How we work
• We are looking for hard, relentless engineers who treat shipping as the only metric.
• In-person, on the hardware. SF, on-site, full-time. Relocation will be supported.
• Insane work ethic. Startups win by fast speed, focused and relentless pushes.
• High ownership, high equity. Small team, meaningful equity. Your contribution is significant.
• Demanding and fast-paced. Tight timing constraints, customer commitments, little slack.
• If you've thrived at SpaceX, Tesla, or other fast-moving startups, you'll recognize the energy. If "work-life balance" is your top filter, we are not the right fit.
• What we offer
• Competitive base salary + meaningful equity in an early-stage, fast-growing company.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Relocation support to SF Bay Area.
• A team you'll learn from every day, working on problems that haven't been solved yet.
• Equal opportunity
• We are an equal opportunity employer. We hire on merit and welcome candidates from any background.