Robotics Software Engineer

UnitX•Milpitas, CA

About The Position

UnitX is building the world’s best robotics product to accelerate human productivity in manufacturing. UnitX is a fast-moving startup with a team from Stanford and Google. Since inception, UnitX has shipped 1000+ mission-critical systems across 180+ of the world's leading manufacturers' production lines. Every year, $2.8B dollar worth of products go through UnitX AI inspection system to ensure quality. As a Robotics Software Engineer at UnitX, you will build the core software that turns our robots into reliable, production-ready systems. You will work across the stack from high-level decision-making (planning) down to low-level hardware control (real-time + embedded integration), partnering closely with robotics, hardware, and field/service teams to deliver systems that are safe, resilient, and maintainable in the physical world.

Requirements

Education and experience: 3+ years of real-world experience in Robotics and a BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Applied Math.
Math/robotics fundamentals: Strong understanding of linear algebra and 3D geometry (transformations, quaternions/Euler angles), kinematics, and rigid-body dynamics.
C++ and Python: Strong software engineering fundamentals in modern C++ (STL, templates, memory management) and Python.
Concurrency: Proven ability to write thread-safe code and reason about race conditions, deadlocks, and IPC.
Embedded + systems: Experience with embedded systems (bare-metal, RTOS like FreeRTOS/Zephyr, or embedded Linux) and common buses (I2C, SPI, UART, CAN).
Comfortable operating in ambiguity, making tradeoffs quickly, and debugging issues at the software/hardware boundary.

Nice To Haves

Controller development: Implemented custom controllers (torque, impedance, admittance) or tuning/owning control loops.
Planning + optimization: Experience with MPC, convex optimization, or sampling-based planners (A/RRT/optimization-based planning).
Perception interfaces: Experience defining clean interfaces between perception outputs and planning/control consumers.

Responsibilities

Production software: Design and implement production-quality robotics software in C++ (modern C++ 17 or newer) and Python.
Concurrency + real-time: Build multi-threaded systems where timing, synchronization, and resource locking matter (mutexes, semaphores).
Hardware integration: Interface directly with sensors, actuators, and microcontrollers under real-time constraints (RTOS or Preempt-RT Linux).
Robustness + safety: Design for failures, not happy paths: fault detection, graceful recovery, and safe behavior under unexpected hardware conditions.
Robotics middleware: Build and maintain systems using ROS1/ROS2 (nodes, topics, services, actions).
Subsystem ownership: Own and evolve key subsystems such as motion control, trajectory execution, planning interfaces, or safety monitoring.
Cross-team execution: Collaborate with hardware, perception, and service teams to ship reliable behavior to production deployments.