Founding Engineer

a16z-speedrun•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Motherboard Labs is building an operating layer for companies running fleets of robots and other autonomous machines in real-world operations. Its cloud and edge agents help customers surface incidents, triage issues, record resolutions, and turn operational learnings into reusable workflows and memory across deployments. Deployments are tailored to each customer’s machines, telemetry, operating rules, people, and existing technology stack. The Founding Engineer will work directly with modern fleets to develop specialized customer software while building the shared platform beneath each deployment. The role focuses on reflecting the realities of each customer’s fleet without creating a separate bespoke product for every customer. As the company’s third employee, this engineer will help shape its architecture, product, engineering culture, and customer-deployment model. The work spans customer discovery, integrations and agent tooling, harness optimization, model fine-tuning, and turning recurring customer needs into platform services. The role involves early-startup uncertainty, customer challenges, product decisions, and time constraints, and requires independent ownership alongside close collaboration with the team.

Requirements

Strong engineering background; computer science, mathematics, software engineering, or physics preferred.
Cross-functional experience, such as taking on multiple roles at a startup or driving product and commercial thinking at a larger company.
Experience owning and shipping meaningful software.
Ability to work directly with demanding customers.
Ability to move between customer deployment work and platform architecture.
Willingness to work in person and travel to customer sites 25–50% of the time.

Nice To Haves

Experience in robotics, autonomy, physical AI, fleet management, industrial or warehouse automation, IoT, telemetry, or observability.
Experience building systems with strong security practices around customer data, permissions, access controls, and data isolation.
Experience as a founding or early engineer who helped deploy a product with its first enterprise customers.
Experience as a forward deployed engineer who improved the platform beneath customer implementations.
Experience as a platform or infrastructure engineer seeking closer work with customers and end users.
Experience in a field where software interacts with complex real-world systems.

Responsibilities

Work directly with customers and their fleets to build specialized software and shared platform capabilities.
Interview customer employees to understand their challenges.
Build integrations and agent tooling for customer data sources.
Optimize harness capabilities using trace data.
Fine-tune specialized models for firmware error diagnosis.
Generalize recurring customer needs into shared platform services.
Help shape the company’s architecture, product, engineering culture, and customer-deployment model.
Navigate customer challenges, product decisions, and time constraints in an early-stage startup.
Own work independently while collaborating closely with the team.
Work in person and travel to customer sites 25–50% of the time.