Senior Robotics Software Engineer
UnitX
Location
HQ
Employment Type
Full time
Location Type
On-site
Department
Software
Title:
Robotics Software Engineer
About Us:
UnitX is building the world’s best robotics product to accelerate human productivity in manufacturing. UnitX is a fast-moving startup with a team from Stanford and Google. Since inception, UnitX has shipped 1000+ mission-critical systems across 180+ of the world's leading manufacturers' production lines. Every year, $2.8B dollar worth of products go through UnitX AI inspection system to ensure quality.
Role Overview:
As a 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: 3+ 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). 
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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