Founding Engineer, Robotics / Software

HABIT deploys on-demand robotic labor to you — and to restaurants, hotels, stores, and farms in your neighborhood. 

We’re backed by Y Combinator (X25) and work in person at our office in El Segundo, just south of the Los Angeles Airport close to the beach.

We’re looking for a Founding Robotics / Software Engineer to join us as we deliver robotic services to millions of Americans.

Responsibilities

You’ll work directly with our co-founders to design and build robotic systems that scale across thousands of neighborhoods. As a generalist, you’ll:

• Own key components of our perception, navigation, and interaction stack
• Design real-time autonomy pipelines in ROS 2 for dynamic, semi-structured environments
• Integrate sensors, compute, and mobility hardware into a field-ready robotic system
• Design and iterate on production-grade robotic hardware, from prototype to deployment
• Build behavior trees and control policies to manage user interaction, navigation, and task completion

Required Qualifications

• 1.5 years of work experience as a software engineer, robotics engineer, or similar
• Bachelor’s degree
• 2 years of experience working with ROS 2 in real-world robotic applications
• Experience designing, prototyping, and sourcing mechanical components for robotic system
• Proficiency with CAD software and mechanical design workflows
• Experience deploying navigation, localization, and SLAM solutions in indoor settings
• Strong Python skills; familiarity with robotics libraries like rclpy, nav2, tf2, and OpenCV
• Intermediate C knowledge (able to modify and extend ROS nodes and open-source libraries)
• Comfortable working across the full stack, from hardware integration to field deployment

Desired Qualifications

• Experience integrating and tuning robot perception pipelines using multimodal sensors and computer vision
• Familiarity with mobile base platforms
• Experience with behavior trees (e.g. BT.CPP) or customer-facing robot deployments
• Strong interest in real-world human-robot interaction or service robotics

Additional Requirements

• This position is 100% on-site in El Segundo, CA — no remote option available
• Unfortunately, we are unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time
• Must have a valid U.S. Driver’s License
• Willingness to work extended hours or weekends as needed to hit milestones