Staff Engineer (Robotics Communication)

Location: On-site in Metzingen / Riederich, Germany

Company

hirify.global develops robots and the communication infrastructure connecting their servo drives, robot middleware, fleet cloud, and developer SDK.

What you will do

• Own the architectural direction of the full robot communication stack, including real-time drive buses, middleware, industrial fieldbus protocols, fleet cloud connectivity, and the Neuraverse SDK.
• Govern gRPC/protobuf APIs, including contract standards, versioning, backward compatibility, and streaming RPC patterns.
• Set DDS and ROS2 middleware standards covering QoS, shared-memory transport, zero-copy configuration, and domain isolation.
• Define architecture for PROFINET, EtherNet/IP, OPC UA, and safety bus integrations.
• Lead cross-team state machine and API design reviews, technical RFCs, and cluster knowledge-sharing sessions.
• Provide technical leadership to approximately 20 engineers while remaining a hands-on individual contributor.

Requirements

• 8+ years of hands-on engineering experience across embedded real-time systems and robot communication middleware.
• Production hardware experience implementing and commissioning EtherCAT master stacks such as SOEM or EtherLab.
• Experience implementing IEEE 1588/PTP hardware clock synchronization and configuring TSN traffic shaping and deterministic Ethernet scheduling.
• Deep production-level DDS expertise, including QoS design, shared-memory transport, zero-copy, and domain isolation; ROS2 proficiency with ros2_control, lifecycle nodes, diagnostics, and launch architecture.
• Strong C++17/20 experience under real-time loop constraints, including lock-free data structures, 1 kHz control loops, and latency profiling.
• Demonstrated cross-team architectural impact, RFC leadership, and mentoring experience accelerating an engineer toward senior or Staff-equivalent level.

Nice to have

• Industrial fieldbus implementation experience with PROFINET, EtherNet/IP, FSoE, or PROFIsafe.
• Fleet robotics platform experience with OTA pipelines, VDA 5050, or large-scale fleet telemetry.
• Developer SDK design experience for external developers and open-source contributions to robotics communication infrastructure.

Culture & Benefits

• Pure individual contributor role with technical authority and no people-management responsibility.
• Hands-on engineering, design reviews, RFC writing, and architecture ownership are central to the role.
• Peer-to-peer quarterly knowledge days focus on solving real engineering problems and producing shared libraries or design documents.
• Mentoring and cross-team collaboration are core expectations.