Senior Robotics Systems Engineer

Who we are

Cartken is a startup at the forefront of autonomous robotics and last-mile delivery. Our team has more than a century of combined experience solving some of the toughest challenges in autonomous vehicles, robotics, and operations at Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. We have robots operating around the world providing reliable and cost-effective solutions for industrial and last-mile delivery use cases.

The AI powering our robots makes them the safest, most reliable and versatile in the market today. Our system runs on small delivery robots as well as industrial robots weighing up to multiple tons. We own the full stack from hardware design & firmware over edge AI to orchestration & management in the cloud. Excellence & value for our customers drives our decisions. We highly value high ownership & high contribution individuals to keep our management & communication structure lean, pleasant & effective.

You can read more about Cartken here .

Our mission

Bring safe and reliable mobile robots to new frontiers.

Why join us

• We’re passionate about applying state-of-the-art technology to solve real-world problems and become the brains behind an automation revolution
• We’re fast and thrive on making an impact
• You get to work alongside a diverse team of super talented people across USA and Germany
• You’ll also get to build a growing startup and by default do and learn a tonÂ

What you'll do

• Bridge the gap: Develop and maintain the hardware abstraction layers that allow our higher-level autonomy modules to interact seamlessly with the physical robot.
• Own the hardware interfaces: Write and maintain robust C++ user-space drivers for our sensors and actuators (I2C, SPI, CAN, Serial), guaranteeing clean, high-quality data flows into the autonomy stack.
• Champion system safety: Design and implement fail-safes and critical safety functions—from electronic-stop logic to collision avoidance and system health monitoring—at both the firmware and middleware levels.
• Deploy on edge compute: Build and deploy containerized robotics applications for edge computing platforms. You'll ensure high-performance access to hardware peripherals and leverage hardware acceleration (GPU/NPU/DSP) to power our autonomy tasks.
• Shape the autonomy stack: While your core responsibility resides on the system side, you will actively contribute to our higher-level robotics modules. You'll partner closely with our autonomy teams to build features, tune parameters, and tackle complex challenges within our SLAM, perception, and navigation pipelines.

What you bring

• Strong proficiency in modern C++ (17/20) and Python.
• Solid experience developing in a Linux environment.
• Strong ownership, curiosity to expand your horizon and ability to drive architecture independently
• Ability to use agentic AI workflows effectively while fully owning the output/outcome.

How you will stand out

• Hands-on experience building with ROS / ROS2 systems.
• Experience with any of the following sensors: lidar (2d or 3d), radar, stereo camera, IMU, GNSS/RTK, ultrasonic, wheel odometry
• Proficiency with Docker, specifically in contexts that require containerized apps to interface heavily with physical hardware.
• A solid grasp of higher-level robotics algorithms (such as sensor fusion, computer vision, SLAM, path planning, or motion control)
• Experience implementing safety-critical logic or fail-safe mechanisms in a physical robotics context.

If you are interested, send in your resume, and please write a few sentences (without AI) to tell us about yourself, anything particularly relevant to this position, and something you are excited about to work on at Cartken.