Robotics Software Lead

Title: Robotics Software Lead Location: San Francisco Bay Area, California, United States

Robotics Software Lead

GRAM, Los Angeles moving to the San Francisco Bay Area

About the company

GRAM Corporation scales skilled labor for the physical economy. We design, manufacture and operate insectoids, general-purpose machines not built in our image. They work in large populations on the critical infrastructure nations depend on. The electric grid comes first. Our research is in how those populations coordinate and keep themselves running. The goal is Self-Replication (SR), the point where a population of machines delivers more labor than it takes to build and run.

The role

You will be the architect of the full onboard software stack and the central node of the system. You own the message passing architecture, the middleware and the real time performance, so that every module (perception, controls, planning and drivers) communicates at the right speed with no latency surprises. You are not expected to own locomotion, perception or controls directly.

This is a hands on role, you report to the Head of Engineering, start as an individual contributor, and have a path to build a team as the company scales.

What you will do

• Own the onboard software architecture: how perception, estimation, planning and control fit together and communicate.
• Own real time performance across the stack, with latency and jitter budgets for every loop that touches hardware, and find where cycle time is being lost.
• Define and own the middleware layer and time synchronization across sensors and compute.
• Partition workloads across CPU, GPU and microcontrollers so safety critical loops stay isolated from autonomy and AI.
• Build the logging and replay tooling used to debug field runs.

What you bring

• Real production experience with pub/sub middleware, Zenoh or DDS.
• 8+ years experience
• Real time OS experience, including profiling, tracing and latency analysis.
• A solid understanding of concurrency and inter process communication, including memory management.
• Strong C++ and working knowledge of Python.
• You have designed the software architecture of a robot or a similar real time system and carried it through to production or field deployment.

Nice to have

• Experience with legged, humanoid or other mobile robots, ideally standalone and battery powered rather than fixed arm.
• EtherCAT or other fieldbus implementations.
• GPU platforms such as NVIDIA Jetson and onboard AI inference runtimes.
• Experience from autonomous vehicles, aerospace or drones where real time architecture is a core discipline.

Why join

• A clean slate architecture, with the freedom to build things properly from scratch.
• Early equity, included in the package.
• The chance to own a domain and build a team around it.
• A small, hands on team where everyone does real work