Senior Principal Architect, Humanoid Robotics & AI Platform

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

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus

Insurance coverage

Paid time off

Remote/hybrid work

Equity awards

Job summary

Cerence is seeking a Senior Principal Technical Solution Architect – Humanoid Robotics in the California Bay Area. You will own end-to-end software architecture for humanoid robot apps, bridging AI, ROS, and hardware, guiding critical technical decisions and leading a startup-style engineering team.

Responsibilities include defining platform reuse across robotic forms, selecting robotics frameworks, ensuring production readiness, and collaborating with OEMs and partners to deploy customer

Qualifications

• Robotics domains include SLAM, Nav2, MoveIt2, perception pipelines, sensor fusion, DDS, and distributed architectures.
• Proven experience designing cyber-physical systems under compute, thermal, and power constraints.
• Advanced C++ and Python architectural design expertise.
• Strong Linux (Ubuntu/Debian) and containerized deployments knowledge.

Responsibilities

• System Architecture: design scalable, modular software for humanoid robot apps.
• Tech Stack Selection: evaluate robotic software frameworks and SDKs.
• Hardware-Software Co-design: optimize latency, compute, thermal envelopes, battery use.
• Platform Reuse: enable modular reuse of app logic across robot forms.
• AI & Agentic Systems: integrate foundation models, agentic workflows, multimodal reasoning.
• Production Readiness: ensure reliability, observability, security, and maintainability.
• Team Supervision: lead and unblock a startup-like engineering team.

Skills

Robotics Domains

Systems Engineering

C++

Python

Linux

Leadership

Robotics Experience

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in CS/Robotics/SE/EE

Tools

NVIDIA Isaac SDK

Isaac Sim

Omniverse

Gazebo

Webots

Intel RealSense

Zephyr RTOS

Job description

Cerence is seeking a Senior Principal Technical Solution Architect – Humanoid Robotics in the California Bay Area. You will own end-to-end software architecture for humanoid robot apps, bridging AI, ROS, and hardware, guiding critical technical decisions and leading a startup-style engineering team.

Responsibilities include defining platform reuse across robotic forms, selecting robotics frameworks, ensuring production readiness, and collaborating with OEMs and partners to deploy customer