Founding Engineer

Founding Robotics Software and AI Engineer

Dream Robotics is building general-purpose robots that can perform useful work in businesses and homes. We are customer-centered, but we are also building core technology: multimodal sensing, scalable wearable data collection systems, robot learning infrastructure, and cost-efective mobile robots designed for real deployment.

This role is for someone who is strongest in software and AI, but is comfortable working on real robots. You should be able to train models, debug pipelines, read logs, SSH into a robot, reason through a control failure, and physically help get the system running again when a policy drives the robot arm into the table.

You will build the software systems that make our robots useful in the real world. That includes training infrastructure, offline data processing pipelines, model design, model evaluation, feedback control, computer vision, firmware, robot runtime systems, and deployment infrastructure.

What you’ll work on

Model training for robot policies, perception models, and vision-language-action systems

Offline data processing pipelines for robot demonstrations, multimodal sensor data, video, tactile data, and robot logs

Model evaluation tools, benchmarks, failure analysis workflows, and regression testing

Robot control software, feedback control, motion execution, and safety-critical runtime systems

Computer vision, perception, SLAM, calibration, camera drivers, and sensor integration

NixOS-based robot software, networking, device management, and field debugging

Fleet management, robot observability, remote diagnostics, OTA updates, and deployment tooling

Firmware and low-level interfaces across cameras, actuators, sensors, embedded controllers, and compute systems

Software infrastructure that supports real customer deployments, not just lab demos

You do not need to have done every item above before. We care most about strong software ability, robotics judgment, fast learning, and comfort owning messy real-world systems end to end.

What we’re looking for

Master’s degree or PhD in robotics, computer science, electrical engineering, or AI

Strong experience training VLA models

Strong software engineering skills, especially in systems that interact with real hardware

Experience building software for robotics, autonomous systems, embodied AI, drones, AVs, manipulation, mobile robots, or similar physical systems

Strong Python and C /Rust skills

Comfort working in Linux environments

Experience with robot data, model training, perception, controls, simulation, or deployment infrastructure

Ability to debug across the stack: model behavior, logs, networking, sensors, drivers, control loops, and hardware interfaces

Good engineering judgment around reliability, safety, latency, observability, and field deployment

Willingness to work hands-on with robots, including setup, testing, debugging, and occasional mechanical fixes

Helpful experience

Vision-language-action models, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, diffusion policies, or robot foundation models

Large-scale model training, distributed training, data pipelines, dataset curation, or experiment tracking

SLAM, visual-inertial odometry, calibration, mapping, localization, or navigation

Camera drivers, sensor synchronization, embedded Linux, ROS 2, real-time systems, or firmware

Robot fleet management, OTA updates, remote monitoring, networking, or production deployment systems

Simulation, sim-to-real, synthetic data, or evaluation environments

Manipulation, mobile manipulation, humanoids, dexterous hands, tactile sensing, or multimodal sensing

Who you are

You are a software-first robotics engineer who wants to build systems that work outside the lab. You like models, but you also care about data quality, evaluation, deployment, reliability, and the unglamorous infrastructure that makes robots actually useful.

You move quickly, communicate clearly, and take ownership. You are comfortable with ambiguity, but you do not hide behind it. When a robot fails, you want to know why, fix the system, and make sure the same failure is caught automatically next time.

Why join

You will work on the full stack of embodied AI: data collection, model training, perception, control, deployment, and real customer use cases. You will help build robots designed to scale beyond demos into useful labor across businesses and homes.

Compensation

Base salary $150k-200k. Equity 1-2%