Member of Technical Staff, Software Engineer, Platform

Pantograph; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Pantograph is building general purpose robots by training models on internet-scale video, with a focus on scalable backend infrastructure for our customer-facing product.

This internal platform engineering role centers on designing and building shared services, deployment tooling, and reliable data hosting to support accounts, access, messaging, and payments. The ideal candidate blends backend excellence with pragmatic product judgment and hands-on leadership.

Qualifications

• Substantial experience building and operating production software.
• Strong backend and infrastructure experience with good product judgment.
• Ability to provide technical guidance while staying hands-on.
• Excellent API design and system architecture judgment.
• Strong collaboration with product and engineering teams.
• Experience with deployment, monitoring, and reliability.

Responsibilities

• Design and build internal infrastructure powering our customer-facing product.
• Own shared services, databases, and deployment reliability.
• Collaborate with product, interface, and robot software teams to build APIs and services for accounts, access, messaging, payments, and data hosting.
• Provide technical guidance while staying hands-on.

Skills

Production software

API design

Service architecture

Cross-team collaboration

Deployment & reliability

Interfaces & abstractions

Technical guidance

AI tools usage

Tools

CI/CD tooling

Data storage

Infrastructure security

Job description

Pantograph is building general purpose robots by training models on internet-scale video. We believe the path to capable robots runs through general intelligence rather than narrow, robot-specific skills. We believe there is an enormous amount of work worth doing in the physical world that would make life better for people. As AI models make it easier to build software around our needs, we believe robots can give people that same power to shape the physical world.

Across research, hardware, and software, we believe in finding simple ideas that work, doing them extremely well, and scaling them up. We value clear thinking, careful execution, and systems we can understand, trust, and improve.

We're looking for an experienced software engineer to design and build the internal infrastructure that powers our customer-facing product. You'll work closely with our product, interface, and robot software teams to build shared APIs, services, and infrastructure for accounts, access, messaging, payments, and data hosting. This is an internal platform engineering role, rather than a forward-deployed role building integrations or managing individual customer deployments.

You'll own these systems: developing shared services, keeping databases and infrastructure reliable, and improving how we build, test, and deploy software. Your work will give our team a strong foundation for building and shipping the robot product as our customer base grows.

A robotics background is not a requirement. The ideal fit is someone with strong backend and infrastructure experience, good product judgment, and the ability to provide technical guidance while staying hands-on.

You might be a good fit if you:

• Have substantial experience building and operating production software


• Design clear APIs and have good judgment about service architecture, databases, and infrastructure


• Enjoy working with product and engineering teammates to turn open-ended requirements into reliable systems


• Are comfortable owning deployment, monitoring, debugging, and reliability


• Are pragmatic and reach for the simplest thing that solves the problem


• Enjoy finding the right abstraction for a given problem and building interfaces that make it easy for other systems to interact with your system


• Communicate well and enjoy being someone teammates turn to for technical guidance


• Use AI tools extremely effectively

Bonus if you've worked with:

• Accounts, authentication, permissions, or billing systems


• CI/CD and tooling that helps engineering teams ship reliably


• Data storage, hosting, and transfer


• Application and infrastructure security


• Connected devices or software that interacts with hardware

We care much more about what you've built than credentials. We're a small, fast-moving team working together in person in San Francisco. If this sounds exciting to you, we want to hear from you.