Software Engineer, Robotics Data

WorldEngine AI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Frontier AI, a robotics-focused data infrastructure company in the San Francisco Bay Area, is seeking a Software Engineer to build scalable pipelines, formats, and storage for robotics data. You’ll bridge data systems with customer infrastructure and customize schemas for bespoke requests.

You will work on high-volume data pipelines, contribute to platform architecture decisions, and collaborate with engineers and researchers to ship data deliveries efficiently at scale.

Qualifications

• Strong backend and data engineering fundamentals in a modern language (Python, Go, Rust) and comfort operating production systems on AWS and GCP.
• Experience building and owning high-volume data pipelines, not just contributing to them.
• Experience with large binary formats, streaming ingestion, distributed batch processing, and object storage economics.
• Customer-facing instincts: you can lead a technical conversation, ask the right questions, and push back when a request is unreasonable.
• Comfort working through ambiguity and shipping iteratively with a product team, where requirements evolve with the customers and data types.

Responsibilities

• Own the reusable infrastructure behind robotics data deliveries: the processing, packaging, and delivery systems
• Format and transform datasets to per-client specification: MCAP and other container formats, custom schemas, field mappings, metadata, and versioning
• Work directly with customer engineering teams to scope and build bespoke schemas, custom fields, and one-off transforms where requirements are custom
• Build and operate the pipelines that move data from our systems into customer storage reliably at petabyte scale
• Partner with operations and product to turn evolving requirements into shipped data deliveries, and prototype quickly when a new data type or customer arrives
• Build automated validation techniques

Skills

Backend engineering

Data pipelines

Distributed systems

Customer-facing skills

Ambiguity tolerance

Tools

AWS

GCP

Job description

About the Role

Frontier AI is going physical, and the labs building it are bottlenecked on one thing: high-quality data from the real world. We pair operational scale with the specialized engineering that physical-world data demands.

As a Software Engineer on Robotics, you’ll sit between our data systems and our customers’ infrastructure. Every frontier lab wants something different: container format, schema, fields, and quality requirements. You’ll build infrastructure general enough that a new customer becomes a quick configuration, and you’ll work directly with customer engineering teams on bespoke requests, feeding what you learn into scalable platform architecture decisions. An example might be modifying the segmentation model derived from a customer request for stricter filtering on hands being in frame and building this into a configurable pipeline feature.

Prior robotics experience is not required. This is a backend and data engineering role at its core, developing pipelines, formats, and storage methods. If you’ve built high-volume data infrastructure anywhere and want depth in robotics data, working directly with the engineers and researchers at the labs and robotics companies building physical AI, this role is for you.

What You’ll Do

• Own the reusable infrastructure behind robotics data deliveries: the processing, packaging, and delivery systems

• Format and transform datasets to per-client specification: MCAP and other container formats, custom schemas, field mappings, metadata, and versioning

• Work directly with customer engineering teams to scope and build bespoke schemas, custom fields, and one-off transforms where requirements are custom

• Build and operate the pipelines that move data from our systems into customer storage reliably at petabyte scale

• Partner with operations and product to turn evolving requirements into shipped data deliveries, and prototype quickly when a new data type or customer arrives

• Build automated validation techniques

What We’re Looking For

• Strong backend and data engineering fundamentals in a modern language (Python, Go, Rust) and comfort operating production systems on AWS and GCP

• Experience building and owning high-volume data pipelines, not just contributing to them

• Experience with large binary formats, streaming ingestion, distributed batch processing, and object storage economics

• Customer-facing instincts: you can lead a technical conversation, ask the right questions, and push back when a request is unreasonable

• Comfort working through ambiguity and shipping iteratively with a product team, where requirements evolve with the customers and data types

Nice to Have

• Experience with robotics/AV data formats and tooling such as MCAP, ROS, protobuf, Foxglove

• Prior work on data engines, pipelines, or delivery for multimodal data

• Multi-sensor data experience across video, depth, inertial, and audio, including calibration and synchronization

• Forward-deployed, solutions, or delivery engineering experience at a data or infrastructure company

• Computer vision or multimodal ML exposure: detection, tracking, or VLM-based labeling and QC