Founding Robotics Engineer

The mission

Robotics is approaching its GPT moment. It won't arrive because of a single model. It'll arrive because someone builds the infrastructure that makes the full data loop, collect, train, eval, deploy, work as one system.

Today, the data loop is held together with scripts, Slack threads, and institutional knowledge. Senior robotics engineers spend more time on plumbing than on the systems they're actually building.

We're building the orchestration layer that fixes this. We're hiring the founding engineers who'll ship it.

The role

Founding robotics software engineer at vfrog. Remote first, anywhere. You'll shape architecture, not inherit one. You'll work directly with the CEO and CTO, talk to customers, and make decisions that shape the product for years.

You'll build:

→ Data ingestion and telemetry from ROS2 / DDS systems

→ Parameterized simulation environments and sim-to-real validation

→ The feedback loop that turns a failed deployment into a regression test, automatically

→ Edge deployment on Jetson Orin with TensorRT and OTA updates

→ Everything in between

Expectations

→ 8+ years of experience shipping robotics software that ran on real hardware, not just sim

→ Built something on your own time, a garage robot, an OSS ROS2 package, a competition entry

→ Fix things you weren't asked to fix, because you can't stand seeing them broken

→ Looking for a mission, not a job

Qualifications

Core: C++ (14/17/20), Python, Rust, Linux.

Robotics: ROS2 (Humble+), DDS (Cyclone or Fast), MCAP, rosbag2, SLAM, sensor fusion, Nav2 or MoveIt2.

Simulation and deployment: Isaac Sim, Gazebo, Jetson Orin/Xavier, CUDA, TensorRT, Docker.

Education: degree from a research-intensive robotics program. ETH Zurich, CMU, MIT, Stanford, Imperial, TU Munich, MBZUAI, University of Tokyo, IIT (Italy), KTH, NTU, KAIST, NUS, Tsinghua, or equivalent.

How to apply

Email [email protected] with:

1. Your CV

2. Links to what you've built outside of work

3. One paragraph, the hardest data or infrastructure problem you've solved in robotics, and why it was hard

No cover letter. No form. We read every email and respond within 48 hours.

• Founding equity is meaningful because you're not joining a company, you're building one.