Robot Systems Engineer

Do you love the layer where robots meet software, and want to own it end to end?

I’m partnering with a newly founded, well-funded robotics startup in San Francisco. They’re building bi-manual robots to automate industrial labour, and they treat robotics as a full-stack problem: hardware, machine learning and deployment infrastructure, built in-house to reach 99.9%+ reliability. Their team comes from leading AI labs, top tech companies and autonomous vehicle companies.

What you’ll do

• Integrate new robot arms, haptic devices, teleoperation rigs and sensors into reliable software stacks used by research and deployment teams


• Build infrastructure for deployed robots, keeping round-trip latency under 200ms across hundreds of miles


• Debug hardware-software problems across drivers, communication protocols, calibration and physical hardware


• Build the software interfaces that connect hardware to ML training and data pipelines


• Work with the ML and hardware teams to get new hardware capabilities into production fast

What we’re looking for

• 1 - 8 years of experience, including 2+ years integrating hardware into software stacks


• Strong software engineering with embedded systems and hardware SDKs (this is essential)


• You’ve integrated robots, sensors or hardware into production systems (this is essential)


• Real-time systems experience where the output can’t stall


• Bonus: ROS or other robotics middleware, and experience at a robotics, AV or physical AI company


• You’re startup-minded, learn fast, and are comfortable debugging when the answer isn’t obvious

Why join

• Own a critical layer: you’ll sit between the hardware and the AI, at the heart of the product


• Early and well funded: join a small team at the start, with competitive equity


• Real robots, real deployment: your work runs on physical machines in industry


• Visa support: transfers and new sponsorships welcome (H-1B, OPT, TN)


• 6 days a week on-site in San Francisco

At HFBAC we look at team fit alongside your CV, so you only talk to companies where you’ll genuinely thrive.