Robotics Software Engineer

About Ixian

Ixian Robotics is building intelligent machines to reindustrialize America. We’re based in San Francisco and backed by a16z and Accel.

We believe robotics is a full-stack problem. Software, hardware, and machine learning are only part of it. Bridging advances in robot learning with America’s industrial base requires invention in how we understand customers, design products, navigate supply chains, and make the economics work. We’re building a company that takes responsibility for all of it.

At Ixian, deployment isn’t the final step after the “real innovation” is complete. Deploying robots is the point of robotics, and deployment is our forcing function for innovation. Putting a machine to work reveals what the lab can’t: what breaks, what matters to the people using it, and what it will take to make our machines indispensable.

Robots are called machines when they work. We intend to build machines.

About the role

You’ll build the software that connects our sensors, robots, and machine learning systems. That includes the runtime on the robot, the infrastructure behind it, and the tools engineers and operators use to run and debug the system.

You’ll work on physical hardware and follow failures across the stack. A dropped frame, a timing error, or a stale calibration can look like a model problem. Your job is to make those problems visible, trace them to their source, and build systems that keep working through repeated use.

What you’ll do

• Build reliable sensor and actuator interfaces, including synchronization, calibration, and low-latency communication.
• Develop the robot runtime: model inference, execution, safety limits, logging, and recovery from faults.
• Build data pipelines with clear schemas, automated validation, and useful search and inspection tools.
• Profile and improve performance across Linux, networking, storage, camera pipelines, and compute.
• Build repeatable deployment and test workflows, with versioning, rollback, and enough telemetry to diagnose failures.
• Work with hardware, ML, and operations to bring up systems, reproduce failures, and remove recurring sources of downtime.

What you’ll bring

• Experience building and maintaining software that interacts with hardware, sensors, or other timing-sensitive systems.
• Strong Python and proficiency in C++ or Rust for performance-sensitive work.
• Practical Linux experience and a systematic approach to profiling, testing, and debugging.
• Sound judgment about interfaces, data integrity, and the tradeoffs between an initial implementation and a maintainable system.
• The ability to take a loosely defined problem through implementation and validation on real equipment.

Useful experience

• Robotics middleware, camera calibration, or sensor synchronization.
• Serving ML models under latency constraints.
• Building data infrastructure or tools used by technicians and operators.

Location: San Francisco · On-site

Schedule: Full-time

Base salary: $150,000–$200,000 per year

Equity: 0.1%–1%

Benefits: Medical, dental, and vision coverage.

Equal opportunity

Ixian Robotics is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.