Cell Platform Lead

Foundry Robotics•San Francisco, CA

1d•$150,000 - $250,000•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. We are hiring the lead for our Cell Platform team. The cell platform is everything between firmware and application software on the robot cell, plus 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. We treat the platform as an internal product. Its customers are our robotics, software, and manufacturing teams; its contract is a consistent, reproducible, performant base cell that they build on without worrying about the layers below. You will own that product: roadmap, releases, and the relationships with the teams that depend on it. This is a player-coach role. You will be hands-on-keyboard from day one while defining the roadmap and hiring the engineers who will form the team around you.

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.
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.
Hardware evaluation and qualification experience.
Containerization and image engineering experience.
Release engineering experience.
Fleet/device management experience.

Nice To Haves

Emphasis on GMSL2 and PoE cameras.
Understand the interaction between RT configuration, DDS middleware, and zero-copy transport paths.
Reason about functional and optimal data transport on single-compute and distributed-compute architectures from first principles (shared memory, zero-copy, DMA/NVMM paths, network protocols), independent of any one middleware, and evaluates alternatives against measured budgets.
Comfortable owning a BOM and working the seam with mechanical/electrical engineering.

Responsibilities

Own the Cell Platform product: roadmap, releases, and relationships with dependent teams.
Define the roadmap and hire engineers for the Cell Platform team.
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.
Design container images deliberately and orchestrate multi-container systems on robot computes.
Develop CI/CD pipelines, manage artifacts/registries, and implement versioned release discipline.
Implement OTA, fleet-scale provisioning, and device observability.