Lead Robotics Platform Engineer

📋 Job Overview

Foundry Robotics is building an AI-native robotics manufacturing company focused on deploying advanced assembly and production capability for leading robotics companies and national-security-critical hardware. We’re building robots that build robots. Factory OS is building software that runs factories. Our platform spans cloud backends, on-prem services, and edge devices deployed on the factory floor.

🏢 About Foundry Robotics

Foundry Robotics is building an AI-native robotics manufacturing company focused on deploying advanced assembly and production capability for leading robotics companies and national-security-critical hardware. Basically, we’re building robots that build robots. Factory OS is building software that runs factories. Our platform spans cloud backends, on-prem services, and edge devices deployed on the factory floor. The operators, supervisors, and managers who use our tools need interfaces that are fast, reliable, and intuitive—even when network conditions aren’t perfect and the environment is demanding.

🎯 The Role

We are hiring the lead for our Cell Platform team. The cell platform is everything between firmware and application software on the robot cell, plus the electronic hardware it runs on: sensors and cameras, computes and carrier boards, networking, the OS and BSP layer, middleware and data transport, provisioning, and fleet infrastructure.

We treat the platform as an internal product. Its customers are our robotics, software, and manufacturing teams; its contract is a consistent, reproducible, performant base cell that they build on without worrying about the layers below. You will own that product: roadmap, releases, and the relationships with the teams that depend on it.

This is a player-coach role. You will be hands-on-keyboard from day one while defining the roadmap and hiring the engineers who will form the team around you.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Own the roadmap, releases, and relationships with teams that depend on the cell platform.
• Define the technical direction and architecture of the platform.
• Build and lead a team of engineers to implement the platform.
• Ensure the platform meets the needs of robotics, software, and manufacturing teams.
• Maintain reliability and performance of the platform in production environments.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of industry experience at AV, humanoid, AMR, or drone companies, owning the layer between BSP and autonomy.
• Experience building and shipping platforms on fleets of robots deployed into production for real customers.
• Embedded Linux/BSP depth: kernel, drivers, device trees, boot, and BSP management; platform bring-up on NVIDIA Jetson and x86 targets.
• Sensor integration and evaluation: has integrated a multitude of sensor types at the driver, SDK, and middleware-wrapper levels, and knows how to design and run sensor evaluations (latency, sync, driver stability, thermal). Emphasis on GMSL2 and PoE cameras.
• Real-time and determinism: configures and validates real-time Linux kernels, CPU isolation, IRQ affinity, and RT scheduling policies to guarantee loop jitter budgets for control at 500 Hz–1 kHz; understands the interaction between RT configuration, DDS middleware, and zero-copy transport paths.
• Middleware fluency: ROS 2 and DDS/RMW internals, QoS, node composition, zero-copy transport.
• Data transport architecture: reasons about functional and optimal data transport on single-compute and distributed-compute architectures from first principles (shared memory, zero-copy, DMA/NVMM paths, network protocols), independent of any one middleware, and evaluates alternatives against measured budgets.
• Hardware evaluation and qualification: has sourced, brought up, and qualified sensors/computes/networking on real robots; comfortable owning a BOM and working the seam with mechanical/electrical engineering.
• Containerization and image engineering: designs images deliberately (layer ordering for build cache, multi-stage builds, minimal runtime images) and orchestrates multi-container systems on robot computes.
• Release engineering: CI/CD pipelines, artifact/registry management, versioned release discipline.
• Fleet/device management: OTA, provisioning at fleet scale, device observability.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience with factory automation and industrial software patterns.
• Experience with edge computing platforms and technologies.
• Experience with frontend architecture and developer experience.

🎁 Benefits

The base salary range for this full-time position in the location of San Francisco is: $150,000—$250,000 USD. Compensation packages at Foundry Robotics for eligible roles include base salary, equity, and benefits. You'll also receive benefits including, but not limited to: Comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage, and generous PTO.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

We are committed to being deeply embedded in the U.S. industrial base. Our focus is simple: build adaptive robotic assembly systems that make American manufacturing scalable, resilient, and competitive again.