Remote Lead Architect, Humanoid Robotics & AI Platforms

Cerence Inc.; United States; Hybrid; USD 193,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Salary range $192,500.00 - $290,000.00

Annual bonus opportunity

Insurance coverage (medical, dental,-

Paid time off

Paid holidays

Company contribution to retirement

Equity awards for certain positions

Remote and/or hybrid work available

Job summary

Cerence Inc. is seeking a Senior Principal Systems Engineer for Humanoid Robotics in the California Bay Area.

You will own end-to-end architectures for humanoid robot applications, bridging AI, ROS, and hardware while guiding critical technical decisions and a startup-style engineering team. You will define reusable platforms across robotics, AI, voice, cloud, and edge systems, and lead decisions on frameworks, OS, SDKs, and deployment architectures.

Qualifications

• Robotics Domains: Deep understanding of Navigation & Localization (SLAM, Nav2), Manipulation & Motion Planning (MoveIt2), Perception Pipelines, Sensor Fusion, Robot Middleware, DDS communication, and distributed robotics architectures.
• Systems Engineering: Proven experience designing cyber-physical systems operating under compute limitations, thermal constraints, battery optimization, network intermittency, and fail-safe operational requirements.
• Programming: Advanced C++ (17/20) and Python architectural design expertise.
• Operating Systems: Strong mastery of Linux (Ubuntu/Debian), containerized deployments, and embedded computing platforms.
• Leadership: 3+ years managing engineering teams in startup, R&D, robotics, or fast-paced product development environments.
• Experience: 8+ years in robotics, autonomous systems, industrial automation, physical AI, or complex cyber-physical environments.

Responsibilities

• System Architecture: Design scalable, modular software architectures for humanoid robot applications.
• Tech Stack Selection: Evaluate and select robotic software frameworks, developer SDKs, etc.
• Hardware-Software Co-design: Collaborate closely with mechanical and electrical teams to optimize system latency, compute allocation, thermal envelopes, battery utilization, and power budgets.
• Platform Reuse: Drive a platform strategy enabling modular reuse of application logic across different physical robot forms.
• AI & Agentic Systems: Define how foundation models, agentic orchestration frameworks, memory systems, multimodal AI, and reasoning engines integrate into robot applications.
• Production Readiness: Ensure deployed solutions meet reliability, observability, maintainability, security, and operational requirements.
• Team Supervision: Lead, mentor, and unblock a small, fast-moving startup team of developers.

Skills

Robotics domains

Systems engineering

C++

Python

Linux

Leadership

Startup experience

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related discipline

Job description

Cerence Inc. is seeking a Senior Principal Systems Engineer for Humanoid Robotics in the California Bay Area.

You will own end-to-end architectures for humanoid robot applications, bridging AI, ROS, and hardware while guiding critical technical decisions and a startup-style engineering team. You will define reusable platforms across robotics, AI, voice, cloud, and edge systems, and lead decisions on frameworks, OS, SDKs, and deployment architectures.