Robotics Platform Engineer

XDOF; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

XDOF in San Francisco seeks a Robotics Platform Engineer to build the product and infrastructure that lets us deploy and evaluate learned robot policies on real hardware. You will work on VLAs, imitation learning, and DAgger workflows, delivering interfaces for partners to run experiments.

You will own deployment, evaluation, and orchestration across robot stations, integrating LLMs into workflows and containerizing stacks for rapid onboarding in a fast-paced, 0→1 environment at the frontier of

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Robotics, or a related field.
• 3+ years of industry experience in software engineering, with exposure to robotics or ML deployment.
• Strong Python skills and comfort working in Linux environments.
• Experience deploying ML models to real systems, not just training them.
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and building reproducible deployment workflows.

Responsibilities

• Deploy learned robot policies (VLAs, imitation learning, DAgger) on real hardware, including inference setup and on-robot tuning.
• Build evaluation frameworks to benchmark policy performance on physical robots with metrics and partner-facing reporting.
• Create products that let partners configure, launch, and monitor evaluation runs and model deployments.
• Develop orchestration systems to schedule evaluation runs and deployments across robot stations.
• Integrate LLMs and foundation models into robot workflows for task specification and high-level planning.
• Containerize and package robot-side software stacks for quick onboarding of new stations.
• Bridge on-robot systems with cloud compute, storage, and orchestration.

Skills

Python

Linux

Docker

ML deployment

ROS/ROS2

Robot software

On-robot evaluation

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent in CS/Robotics

Tools

ROS/ROS2

Job description

At XDOF, we’re at an inflection point. Frontier labs are racing to build general-purpose robots, and high-quality training data is the bottleneck. We’re building the foundation behind the foundation models – the data collection systems, operational capability, exabyte-scale data warehouse, and software toolchain – to help our partners drive the field forward.

We’re looking for a Robotics Platform Engineer to build the product and infrastructure that lets us and our partners deploy and evaluate learned robotis policies on real hardware. Examples of things you might work on are: deploying VLAs, imitation learning models, and DAgger workflows onto embodied systems, building the evaluation frameworks that measure how they perform, and shipping the product surfaces that make this accessible to partners.

What You’ll Do

Robotics platform engineers own the systems that get models running on robots and measure how well they work. Sample projects include:

• deploying and running learned robot policies (VLAs, imitation learning, DAgger) on real hardware, including inference setup, on-robot tuning, and failure diagnosis
• designing and building evaluation frameworks that benchmark policy performance on physical robots, with metric definition, result aggregation, and partner-facing reporting
• building the product that lets partners configure, launch, and monitor evaluation runs and model deployments
• building orchestration systems that schedule evaluation runs and model deployments across robot stations
• integrating LLMs and foundation models into robot workflows for task specification, error recovery, or high-level planning
• containerizing and packaging robot-side software stacks so new stations and deployments can be brought online quickly and consistently
• bridging on-robot systems with cloud-side compute, storage, and orchestration

About You

Baseline skills:

• bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Robotics, or a related field
• 3+ years of industry experience in software engineering, with exposure to robotics or ML deployment
• strong Python skills and comfort working in Linux environments
• experience deploying ML models to real systems, not just training them
• familiarity with containerization (Docker) and building reproducible deployment workflows

You might be a good fit if you:

• have deployed imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or VLA policies on physical robots
• have built evaluation or benchmarking infrastructure for robotic systems or ML models
• have experience with DAgger or other interactive data collection and policy refinement loops
• have experience with ROS/ROS2 and understand robotics middleware at the integration level
• have built product features or partner-facing tools on top of technical infrastructure
• are very comfortable working in 0→1 environments
• are mission-driven and passionate about robotics: work at XDOF is fast-paced and constant. We hope you love what you’re going to be doing, because you’ll be doing a lot of it!