Senior Software Engineer

The datacenter buildout is the largest industrial project in human history. Gradient builds the autonomous robots that make it possible.

 Partnered with the world’s largest AI infrastructure companies and backed by the industry’s best investors, Gradient moves fast and builds full-stack systems that matter.

The Opportunity

Gradient is looking for a Founding Software Engineer to own how the robots move data from AI models to actuators. You will work close to the hardware — from kernel and firmware up through the controls and perception layers — owning real-time pipelines that move hundreds of megabytes at single-digit millisecond latency.

Vision inference, control loops, and actuation all live on the same clock. Your job is to keep them there. The goal: bring visibility and determinism into the end-to-end inference pipeline so the ML model is the only stochastic component. You will ship performance-critical code to real robots daily.

What You’ll Do

• •      Own the full data flow: camera frames in, perception and planning in the middle, control commands and actuator feedback out, and every system that carries them


• •      Own the real-time control loop: keep high-rate control running deterministically alongside vision inference, and make sure a slow frame never becomes a late motor command


• •      Build the perception data path: move high-bandwidth camera streams into CV and ML models with minimal latency and zero silent drops


• •      Push down latency and tighten the stack to make the system faster, more deterministic, and more reliable


• •      Build the tooling and instrumentation that make real-time behavior across controls and vision observable and debuggable

You Should Have

• •      5+ years of software engineering experience building production systems close to hardware — drivers, kernels, embedded, robotics, or similar


• •      Proficiency in Rust, Python, and C++ with strong understanding of operating systems and multithreading


• •      Experience with infrastructure tooling including Bazel, Nix, HIL testing, and CI/CD


• •      Linux kernel and embedded systems experience


• •      Experience debugging timing and concurrency issues in production


• •      Proven ability to own messy, ambiguous problems and turn them into robust software


• •      Ability to work on-site in San Francisco 5 days/week

Nice to Have

• •      Experience with real-time control systems including motor control, high-rate control loops, or robot controllers


• •      Computer vision pipeline experience: camera drivers, image transport, GPU inference, or sensor synchronization


• •      Tracing and profiling experience using ftrace, flamegraphs, or eBPF


• •      Linux I/O experience including DPDK, SPDK, or io_uring


• •      Comfort using AI tools to multiply your own output