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Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Robotics Platform

FieldAI· Engineering – Autonomy
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Irvine, CA$150k - $215kFull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

FieldAI’s Irvine team builds risk-aware, reliable, field-ready AI systems for embodied intelligence. The role focuses on defining and implementing the robotics platform that runs foundation models across multiple robots and hardware configurations, solving cross-cutting engineering problems at the intersection of robotics, distributed systems, middleware, and performance engineering.

Responsibilities

  • Architect the software platform for physical AI—the foundation on which our autonomy runs across legged robots, ground vehicles, humanoids, and future embodiments
  • Define the interfaces and contracts between major subsystems, and steward them as versioned, well-documented APIs that internal teams and external partners can depend on
  • Design the abstractions that describe a robot’s capabilities, state, and intent, creating a consistent contract between on-robot autonomy and higher-level systems such as dashboards, autonomous agents, mission planners, and fleet-management platforms
  • Develop mechanisms for discovering and tracking robot capabilities dynamically as hardware, software, sensors, and autonomy modules change, enabling higher-level systems to determine what missions and behaviors a particular robot can support
  • Drive abstractions that decouple our intelligence from specific robots, sensors, compute platforms, and communication architectures, accelerating integration onto new embodiments
  • Own platform performance end to end, from real-time execution on the robot through distributed communication and cloud connectivity, and establish the standards for latency, throughput, resource utilization, and reliability in the field
  • Build and evolve the middleware and runtime infrastructure that moves high-bandwidth sensor data, model inputs and outputs, commands, and state throughout the system
  • Develop tools and methodologies for profiling, tracing, benchmarking, and understanding system behavior across simulation and physical hardware
  • Partner with autonomy, hardware, simulation, infrastructure, product, and deployment teams to identify systemic bottlenecks and turn recurring integration problems into reusable platform capabilities
  • Set the technical direction for platform engineering at FieldAI: write designs, build consensus across teams, raise the engineering bar through review and mentorship, and help grow the team

Qualifications

  • Education: B.S. or higher in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
  • Experience: 5+ years building production robotics or systems software, including hands-on ownership of platform, framework, or infrastructure software that other engineering teams built on top of
  • Distributed robotic systems: experience architecting distributed systems involving multiple autonomous agents, processes, computers, or robots, with a strong understanding of the failure modes that emerge outside controlled environments
  • Deep ROS 2 and middleware expertise: fluency well beyond application-level use, with a strong command of the distributed systems fundamentals underneath—pub/sub and RPC semantics, quality of service, serialization, discovery, transport, and how these behave on constrained compute and imperfect networks
  • Robot capability and intent modeling: experience designing abstractions that describe what a robot can do, what resources or capabilities are currently available, and what the robot is trying to accomplish
  • API and abstraction design: a track record of designing versioned interfaces, frameworks, or SDKs that evolved successfully across multiple consumers
  • Modern C++ and Python: expert-level proficiency
  • Systems and performance engineering: experience with Linux on embedded or edge compute, profiling and tracing, concurrency, memory and compute constraints, and high-throughput, low-latency data movement
  • Production track record: software running on real hardware in production with operational judgment
  • Judgment and independence: ability to drive ambiguous cross-team problems to shipped outcomes
  • Communication and collaboration: ability to write design documents, align teams, and deliver incrementally

Skills

Required:Education and experience requirementDistributed robotic systems designROS 2 and middlewareAPI and abstraction designC++ and PythonLinux performance engineering

Benefits

  • $150,000 - $215,000 a year
  • Our salary range is generous and we consider each individual’s background and experience when determining final compensation. Base pay may vary based on role scope, job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and the Irvine, California market.
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About FieldAI

Robot intelligence built for the real-world.

FieldAI is the leader in deploying general-purpose robots in unstructured environments, providing a universal brain that works across many robots, and many tasks.

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