Senior Robotics Leader

Instock; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Paid vacation

Paid sick leave

Career development opportunities

Competitive salary

Job summary

Instock is seeking a Senior Robotics Engineer to lead a small team of 2–3 engineers and refine our robot design for production deployment.

You will own the low-latency control, perception, and multi-agent coordination while mentoring peers and delivering reliable systems across North America. The role requires strong C/C++ or Golang skills and an aversion to “production only” corners in robotics.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of C/C++ or Golang experience in robotics.
• Experience leading small engineering teams.
• Experience deploying robotics to production and scaling.

Responsibilities

• Lead a subteam of 2-3 engineers to refine current robot design and architect next generation systems.
• Own low-latency control, perception, state estimation, planning, and multi-agent coordination.
• Mentor engineers and contribute hands-on in a production robotics environment.

Skills

C/C++

Golang

Unix/Linux

Team leadership

English proficiency

Job description

Instock exists to radically improve the way we move and store physical inventory. To achieve this, we must fully unlock the power of robots. The stat of mobile warehouse robotics is invisible relative to the success of consumer electronics, home appliances, or even vacuum cleaning robots. But why? Because robots are heavy and inconvenient for customers. Industrial robotics is running on technicians who are dispatched to customer sites far too often to deal with bulky robots. The result is poor scalability and unaffordable costs.
Founded in 2020, Instock develops software to unlock the power of identical, compact, lightweight autonomous mobile robots. Our robots drive on floors, walls, and ceilings of structures with the agility of a car rather than the rigidity of a train. Existing warehouse racking can also be retrofitted making storage-and-retrieval a drop-in solution. Instock brings the first ASRS robot that can be shipped to customers as a parcel, rather than as freight!

The Challenge Instock’s multi-agent architecture demands expertise across the entire control spectrum—from 200 Hz motor commands to 2 Hz pathfinding. As a Senior Robotics Engineer, you will be a hands‑on contributor and mentor, leading a focused subteam of 2-3 engineers. You’ll be responsible for refining our current robot design while architecting the next generation of Instock robots. Your work will span the full robotics stack:

• Low-latency Control: Actuator tuning and motor command optimization.
• Perception & State: CV-based localization and sensor fusion.
• Intelligence: Navigation, automated planning, and multi‑agent squad coordination.
• You care about making physical systems work! Everyone knows robotics is hard, not everyone has the stamina and skill to make it work reliably in production. You’ve succeeded in the past – your robots seen the light of a day in the hands of customers!
• You have multi‑year broad experience in physical robotics.
• You have been leading small innovative teams.
• You are capable to work on a hard layered problem for a long time (many months and years).
• You are programming in C/C++ or Golang for at least 7 years and are comfortable in a unix‑like setting.
• This position assumes you are a resident of San Francisco Bay Area.
• English proficiency is a must have.
• Benefits include paid vacation, paid sick leave, competitive salary, and career development opportunities.
• You are welcome to actively participate in ASRS installations across North America.

For the past 15 years, members of our team have been engineering and operating at the cutting edge of eCommerce fulfillment. We’ve had the privilege to assist 30 leading retailers in the USA and internationally. As operators, we always wanted to have more flexible and agile automation, so we embarked on a mission to radically improve goods-to-person robotics and make it accessible to every fulfillment business.

Our offices are in Silicon Valley, Bratislava (Slovakia), and Kyiv (Ukraine).

Instock is an equal opportunity company and expressly prohibits any form of workplace discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, genetic information, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristics.