Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Robotics Platform

📋 Job Overview

FieldAI’s Irvine team is where embodied AI meets real robots, real sensors, and real field deployments. Based in the heart of Southern California’s robotics ecosystem, we build risk-aware, reliable, field-ready AI systems that solve the hardest problems in robotics and unlock the full potential of embodied intelligence. If you want your work to ship, get tested on hardware, and improve through real deployments, Irvine is the place. We go beyond typical data-driven approaches or pure transformer-only architectures, combining rigorous engineering with learning systems proven in globally deployed solutions that deliver results today and get better every time our robots run in the field.

🏢 About FieldAI

We’re building the software platform that enables FieldAI’s foundation models to run reliably and efficiently across a growing range of robots, hardware configurations, and real-world applications. As a founding member of the Robotics Platform team, you’ll help define the architecture, interfaces, and runtime systems that make our autonomy stack portable across embodiments while delivering the performance and reliability required for deployment in the physical world.

🎯 The Role

This role sits at the intersection of robotics, distributed systems, middleware, and performance engineering. You’ll work across the full system—from APIs and subsystem boundaries to communication middleware, runtime execution, simulation, and deployment on real hardware—solving the foundational problems that allow autonomy teams to move faster without coupling themselves to a particular robot or hardware stack.

✅ Key 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