SF Bay Area Robotics Systems Engineer - Hands-On

Stealth Startup; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 55,000 - 83,000; Full time

Job summary

Stealth Startup in the Bay Area seeks a hands-on Robotics Systems Engineer to build and operate the robotic platforms behind our research. You will work across hardware, embedded systems, robot software, communications, calibration, data collection, evaluation, and deployment.

You should be comfortable debugging the complete system, from sensors and actuators, closed-loop control, to learned-policy evaluation, and you will collaborate with ML researchers to deploy policies on physical robots.

Qualifications

• BS or MS in Robotics, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Mechatronics, Computer Science, or a related field.
• Experience integrating or operating complete robotic systems.
• Proficiency with Linux, Git, and Python or C++.
• Familiarity with ROS, ROS2, ZMQ or similar communication frameworks.
• Familiarity with sensors, actuators, embedded electronics, networking, and robot system design.
• Understanding of robot-learning workflows and their hardware and electronics requirements.
• Experience with robot data collection or evaluation software.
• Strong cross-stack debugging and problem-solving skills.
• Experience using AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, or comparable tools, including reviewing and validating generated code.
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving environment and taking ownership of ambiguous problems.

Responsibilities

• Bring up, integrate, and maintain humanoids, robotic arms, and custom platforms.
• Debug mechanical, electrical, networking, communication, and software failures.
• Integrate and help design sensors, actuators, motor controllers, embedded devices, compute, wiring, and power systems.
• Develop robot drivers, hardware interfaces, diagnostics, and automation in Python or C++.
• Build distributed robotics software using ROS, ROS 2, ZMQ, and related technologies.
• Maintain teleoperation, robot data collection, dataset validation, and policy-evaluation software.
• Perform calibration, functional testing, reliability testing, and performance characterization.
• Develop logging, monitoring, health checks, and fault-recovery tools.
• Work with ML researchers to deploy and evaluate learned policies on physical robots.
• Improve system reliability, performance, safety, and maintainability.
• Use AI coding agents to accelerate implementation, testing, debugging, and documentation.

Skills

Robotics systems integration

Debugging across stacks

Cross-functional collaboration

AI coding agents usage

Education

BS or MS in Robotics, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Mechatronics, Computer Science, or a related field

Tools

ROS

ROS2

Python

C++

Linux

Git

ZMQ

Job description

Stealth Startup in the Bay Area seeks a hands-on Robotics Systems Engineer to build and operate the robotic platforms behind our research. You will work across hardware, embedded systems, robot software, communications, calibration, data collection, evaluation, and deployment.

You should be comfortable debugging the complete system, from sensors and actuators, closed-loop control, to learned-policy evaluation, and you will collaborate with ML researchers to deploy policies on physical robots.