Principal Robotics Software Engineer
San Francisco, CAFull-timePosted 2w ago
About the role
Weave Robotics is hiring a Principal Robotics Software Engineer to define software architecture across autonomy, perception, controls, and systems to enable reliable, safe robot behavior in real-world deployments. The role centers on the behavior and autonomy layer, translating high-level goals and robot state into coordinated action, and collaborating with domain experts across the robotics stack.
Responsibilities
- Architecture across the stack: Define the interfaces and architectural patterns that allow perception, autonomy, controls, and systems software to compose into reliable robot behavior while remaining modular, debuggable, and extensible.
- Build the behavioral core: Design and build the systems that translate goals and robot state into coordinated action, resolving competing priorities and capabilities as the robot operates in a changing physical environment.
- Enable increasingly intelligent behavior: Develop the infrastructure that allows robots to use context, history, environmental understanding, and user intent to make better decisions over time.
- Own system-level safety: Preconditions, timeouts, fallbacks, and recovery ladders with defined behavior for every way a model or subsystem can misbehave.
- Hunt systemic issues: Latency across module boundaries, timing and resource contention, cascading failures: the problems that belong to no single team land on you, and you resolve them with the domain owners rather than around them.
- Multiply the team: Set interface contracts with the controls, SLAM, and systems engineers who own their domains, review the designs that touch the whole robot, and raise the architectural bar.
Qualifications
- 5+ years building robotics software for robots deployed in the real world, with depth across the stack, from controllers to SLAM to navigation to overall system safety. You’ll have owned at least two of those end-to-end.
- Behavior architecture depth: behavior trees, hierarchical state machines, or task-level executives at production scale, and intuition about an approach’s limits.
- Failure & recovery design: Experience designing systems around partial failure, stale or contradictory state, timeouts, preconditions, interruption, cancellation, retries, and recovery.
- Integrating learned methods: Experience incorporating learned or probabilistic components into larger systems where outputs can be uncertain and overall behavior must remain observable, recoverable, and trustworthy.
- Cross-stack debugging skill: A behavior bug can originate anywhere; you follow it through logs, replay, and other people's code without losing the thread.
- Architecture you can point to: robot systems you designed that other engineers built inside happily, with interfaces that survived years of change.
- Strong C++ and Python and the software habits to keep the most connected component in the stack maintainable.
Skills
Required:Robotics software development across the full stack (controllers, SLAM, navigation, system safety)Behavior architecture (behavior trees, hierarchical state machines, task-level executives)Failure & recovery designIntegrating learned methods into deterministic systemsCross-stack debugging
Last updated Oct 7, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Weave Robotics
Personal robots for the home--that ship in 2025
Making the world’s first personal robot that's built for the home. Our robot, Isaac, will autonomously tidy up endless messes, fold laundry, and care for your home while you’re away, and we’re shipping our first 30 in fall of 2025.
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