Lead Robotics Engineer

TAR•San Francisco, CA

8d•Hybrid

About The Position

TAR builds its own construction robots to install solar at gigawatt scale, where field labor and installation throughput, not equipment supply, become the binding constraint. The racking, the campus layout, and the robots that install it are designed together as one system, from GPS-guided foundation and pile-driving machines to autonomous earthworks. As Lead Robotics Engineer, you are the founding technical lead for this discipline, and you own the end-to-end architecture of TAR's robotic systems across mechanical, electrical, controls, and software. You take the function from an early-stage effort to a rigorous engineering practice, establishing the standards, design reviews, and processes the team scales on while staying hands-on with the hardware and software yourself. This is a senior player-coach role, based at our San Francisco robotics facility with regular travel to our West Texas site.

Requirements

7+ years in robotics engineering, spanning mechanical, electrical, and/or software and controls disciplines relevant to full robotic systems.
Demonstrated experience building or leading a robotics engineering function from an early stage, establishing the processes and standards where none existed rather than operating inside a team someone else built.
Deep hands-on technical expertise across the robotics stack, with the credibility to make and defend architecture decisions.
Experience mentoring or informally leading other engineers, even without a formal management title.
Comfortable operating with significant ownership and ambiguity, building the playbook as you go rather than following one that already exists.
Strong communication skills, able to represent technical decisions to engineering leadership and cross-functional partners.

Nice To Haves

Experience with robotics systems built for austere, field, or industrial and infrastructure environments, such as at Anduril, SpaceX, or Tesla.
Prior experience as a first hire or founding engineer on a robotics team.
Formal people-management experience, even though this seat is defined by technical leadership rather than direct reports on day one.
Familiarity with TAR's broader technology domains, including energy infrastructure and autonomous systems.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end architecture of TAR's robotic systems across mechanical, electrical, controls, and software integration, making and defending the decisions that determine how the machines get built.
Design, build, and iterate on robotics hardware and software directly, staying in the work while setting the direction for how the team executes it.
Establish the engineering practices the discipline runs on from day one, including design review, testing, and validation processes and the documentation standards the team scales on.
Identify and close critical gaps in the team's robotics capability across technical skill, tooling, and process, bringing in the expertise needed to fill them.
Mentor and grow the robotics engineering team as it is built out, setting the technical bar and engineering culture for every future hire.
Partner with hardware, software, and manufacturing leadership to keep robotics decisions aligned with the broader product and deployment roadmap.
Represent robotics engineering in cross-functional planning, translating technical trade-offs into terms the rest of the organization can act on.