Senior Robotics Software Engineer

Title:

Senior Robotics Software Engineer

About Us:

UnitX builds the world's leading physical AI systems to automate repetitive visual tasks in factories. UnitX is a fast-moving startup with a team from Stanford, MIT, Google, and beyond. Since inception, UnitX has deployed 1,000+ mission-critical systems across 190+ of the world's leading manufacturers' production lines. Every year, $15B worth of products go through UnitX's AI inspection system to ensure quality.

Role Overview:

As a Senior Robotics Software Engineer at UnitX, you will build the core software that turns our robots into reliable, production-ready systems. You will work across the stack from high-level decision-making (planning) down to low-level hardware control (real-time + embedded integration), partnering closely with robotics, hardware, and field/service teams to deliver systems that are safe, resilient, and maintainable in the physical world.

What You’ll Do:

* Production software: Design and implement production-quality robotics software in C++ (modern C++ 17 or newer) and Python. 

* Concurrency + real-time: Build multi-threaded systems where timing, synchronization, and resource locking matter (mutexes, semaphores). 

* Hardware integration: Interface directly with sensors, actuators, and microcontrollers under real-time constraints (RTOS or Preempt-RT Linux). 

* Robustness + safety: Design for failures, not happy paths: fault detection, graceful recovery, and safe behavior under unexpected hardware conditions. 

* Robotics middleware: Build and maintain systems using ROS1/ROS2 (nodes, topics, services, actions). 

* Subsystem ownership: Own and evolve key subsystems such as motion control, trajectory execution, planning interfaces, or safety monitoring. 

* Cross-team execution: Collaborate with hardware, perception, and service teams to ship reliable behavior to production deployments.

Who You Are:

* Education and experience: 5+ years of real-world experience in Robotics and a BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Applied Math.

* Math/robotics fundamentals: Strong understanding of linear algebra and 3D geometry (transformations, quaternions/Euler angles), kinematics, and rigid-body dynamics. 

* C++ and Python: Strong software engineering fundamentals in modern C++ (STL, templates, memory management) and Python. 

* Concurrency: Proven ability to write thread-safe code and reason about race conditions, deadlocks, and IPC. 

* Embedded + systems: Experience with embedded systems (bare-metal, RTOS like FreeRTOS/Zephyr, or embedded Linux) and common buses (I2C, SPI, UART, CAN). 

* Comfortable operating in ambiguity, making tradeoffs quickly, and debugging issues at the software/hardware boundary.

Preferred Qualifications:

* Controller development: Implemented custom controllers (torque, impedance, admittance) or tuning/owning control loops. 

* Planning + optimization: Experience with MPC, convex optimization, or sampling-based planners (A*/RRT/optimization-based planning). 

* Perception interfaces: Experience defining clean interfaces between perception outputs and planning/control consumers.

Benefits:

* Competitive salary & equity

* Unlimited PTO

* Full Medical, Dental, Vision, 401k

* Daily meals provided with your own choice