Staff Autonomy Engineer (Robotics)

TL;DR

Staff Autonomy Engineer (Robotics/AI): Designing and implementing the end-to-end autonomy stack for food-assembling robots with an accent on perception, closed-loop control, and production deployment. Focus on building learning-based systems for robot actions, integrating multi-modal sensor feedback, and scaling autonomy across a commercial fleet.

Location: On-site in San Francisco (Must work onsite five days a week)

Salary: $160,000 - $240,000 a year

Company

Early-stage startup building AI-powered robots that assemble fresh meals at scale for large food producers in North America.

What you will do

• Own the end-to-end architecture and hands-on development of the autonomy stack, covering perception, action prediction, closed-loop control, and sensor fusion.
• Design and implement learning-based systems to predict and execute robot actions that generalize across diverse ingredient types.
• Build closed-loop control systems integrating vision, weight feedback, force-torque sensing, and trajectory planning.
• Develop algorithms and tooling for rapid onboarding of new meal types and ingredient configurations from minimal demonstrations.
• Establish production monitoring, failure detection, and data collection pipelines to support model retraining and continuous improvement.
• Mentor senior engineers and lead design reviews to scale the autonomy systems across a growing commercial fleet.

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience shipping a complete autonomy or manipulation system to real-world production deployment.
• Deep technical expertise in at least two of: perception systems, visuomotor control, action prediction, sensor fusion, or motion planning.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals in Python and C++ for production-quality systems.
• Track record of technical leadership, driving architecture decisions and leading cross-functional projects.
• Must be based in or able to work on-site in San Francisco.

Nice to have

• Experience with food, agricultural, or consumer goods robotics with high object variability.
• Proficiency with ML frameworks (PyTorch preferred) and the full model lifecycle.
• Familiarity with foundation model approaches for manipulation such as diffusion policies or VLAs.
• Background in sim-to-real transfer, domain randomization, or synthetic data generation.
• Experience with ROS and real-time robotics middleware.

Culture & Benefits

• Significant early-stage equity package.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k) matching and commuter benefits.
• Flexible paid time off (PTO) and catered lunch.
• High-ownership environment with startup urgency.