Cell Platform Lead

Foundry Robotics•San Francisco, CA

1d•Onsite

About The Position

Foundry Robotics is building an AI-native robotics manufacturing company focused on deploying advanced assembly and production capability for leading robotics companies and national-security-critical hardware. Factory OS is building software that runs factories. Our platform spans cloud backends, on-prem services, and edge devices deployed on the factory floor. The operators, supervisors, and managers who use our tools need interfaces that are fast, reliable, and intuitive—even when network conditions aren’t perfect and the environment is demanding. The role is for the lead of our Cell Platform team. The cell platform encompasses everything between firmware and application software on the robot cell, including the electronic hardware it runs on: sensors and cameras, computes and carrier boards, networking, the OS and BSP layer, middleware and data transport, provisioning, and fleet infrastructure. The platform is treated as an internal product, with customers being our robotics, software, and manufacturing teams. The contract is a consistent, reproducible, performant base cell that these teams can build upon without concern for the underlying layers. The lead will own this product, including its roadmap, releases, and relationships with dependent teams. This is a player-coach role, requiring hands-on work from day one while also defining the roadmap and hiring the engineering team.

Requirements

Built and shipped platforms on fleets of robots deployed into production for real customers.
Several years of production-fleet ownership (typically 8+ years of industry experience at AV, humanoid, AMR, or drone companies, owning the layer between BSP and autonomy).
Embedded Linux/BSP depth: kernel, drivers, device trees, boot, and BSP management; platform bring-up on NVIDIA Jetson and x86 targets.
Sensor integration and evaluation experience, with emphasis on GMSL2 and PoE cameras.
Real-time and determinism configuration and validation experience.
Middleware fluency: ROS 2 and DDS/RMW internals, QoS, node composition, zero-copy transport.
Data transport architecture reasoning skills.
Hardware evaluation and qualification experience.
Containerization and image engineering experience.
Release engineering experience.
Fleet/device management experience.

Responsibilities

Own the roadmap, releases, and relationships with teams that depend on the cell platform.
Be hands-on-keyboard from day one while defining the roadmap and hiring engineers.
Build and ship platforms on fleets of robots deployed into production for real customers.
Manage OTA updates on remote hardware.
Debug failures without physical access.
Maintain reliability against customer expectations.
Integrate a multitude of sensor types at the driver, SDK, and middleware-wrapper levels.
Design and run sensor evaluations (latency, sync, driver stability, thermal).
Configure and validate real-time Linux kernels, CPU isolation, IRQ affinity, and RT scheduling policies.
Reason about functional and optimal data transport on single-compute and distributed-compute architectures.
Source, bring up, and qualify sensors/computes/networking on real robots.
Design container images deliberately (layer ordering for build cache, multi-stage builds, minimal runtime images).
Orchestrate multi-container systems on robot computes.
Develop CI/CD pipelines, artifact/registry management, and versioned release discipline.
Manage OTA, provisioning at fleet scale, and device observability.