Senior Software Engineer, Teleoperation & XR

Persona AI•Houston, TX

About The Position

Persona AI is developing and commercializing rugged, multi-purpose humanoid robots that perform real work. Persona’s founding team has a decades-long history in humanoid robotics, bionics, and product development delivering robust hardware that has touched the stars, worked miles below the surface of the ocean, and even roamed Disney Parks. Our mission is focused squarely on shipping beautiful, reliable products at massive scale, while building a customer-focused team to achieve these aims. The Teleoperation Team is responsible for bridging the gap between biological and artificial intelligence. This role requires building highly optimized, low-latency, reliable data streaming systems over unreliable transports in real-world conditions. At Persona AI, we control the entire hardware and software stack end-to-end, allowing us to integrate hardware, firmware, and backend expertise to achieve a cutting-edge teleoperation system. We are looking for a versatile engineer to drive the development of this system. You will integrate hardware, firmware, and backend expertise to build highly optimized, low-latency data streaming pipelines over unreliable real-world transports. You will work across the stack—from implementing low-level networking in C++ and Rust to designing immersive UX in Unreal Engine. If you are passionate about robotics, real-time rendering, and solving complex latency challenges, this is your opportunity to influence the architecture of a cutting-edge humanoid fleet.

Requirements

Education: Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Robotics, or a related field.
Professional Experience: 5+ years of professional experience in the software industry, preferably with 3+ years dedicated to building 3D/XR or real-time interactive applications.
Core Languages: Exceptional programming skills in Rust, C++ and Python; proficiency with Rust is highly valued.
OS & Systems: Strong experience with Linux (including embedded environments) and Windows. Familiarity with Android development is preferred.
Open Source Expertise: extensive experience utilizing and integrating open source software and libraries; ability to navigate complex dependency chains, modify OSS codebases, and contribute upstream when necessary. Having contributed to an open source community is a big plus.
Robotics Knowledge: Strong understanding of robotic control concepts, including forward/inverse kinematics and 3D geometry.
Networking: Good understanding of networking concepts (Ethernet, TCP/IP) and wireless technologies (Cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth/BLE).

Nice To Haves

XR Ecosystems: Track record of delivering XR features on Android or embedded Linux devices using OpenXR or ARCore. Deep expertise with 3D graphics and game engines, specifically Unreal Engine. Experience with Unity is a plus.
Build Tools: Familiarity with modern build systems like Nix and Bazel.
Low-Level Graphics: Experience writing custom shaders and profiling GPU performance.
Soft Skills: Strong ownership and communication skills; ability to partner with hardware and firmware engineers to drive complex integrations from design to deployment.

Responsibilities

Core Application & XR Development Architect and develop the primary Unreal Engine application used by Remote Operators to interface with our fleet of humanoid robots.
Build highly optimized, low-latency data streaming systems over unreliable real-world network transports.
Develop software that interfaces with hardware SDKs for robot sensing and control, and web APIs for data collection and remote operation.
Design and implement immersive UI/UX for robotic control interfaces, focusing on usability, safety, and high-fidelity feedback.
Build frontend systems for Android and embedded Linux AR devices using Rust, C++, and frameworks like Unity or Stereokit (leveraging OpenXR).
Write and maintain custom shaders and optimize rendering pipelines to ensure high frame rates and visual clarity.
Systems, Networking & Performance Build highly optimized, low-latency, and reliable data streaming protocols capable of functioning over unreliable transports (WiFi, Cellular) in the real world.
Debug and tune system behavior, optimizing for input latency, bandwidth usage, and CPU/GPU memory tradeoffs on-device.
Develop software that interfaces directly with hardware SDKs for robot sensing, control, and data collection.
Orchestrate real-time pipelines, integrating motion capture data and hardware prototypes for human demonstration and training data capture.
Infrastructure & Scalability Influence architectural decisions to allow the system to scale with a growing fleet of robots while efficiently utilizing cloud infrastructure.
Setup and maintain monitoring, metrics, and reporting systems for fine-grained observability and actionable alerting.
Use Python for test harnesses, automation scripts, and build/CI tooling to ensure production-grade software reliability.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams (hardware, firmware, UX) to drive requirements, verify sensor data, and ship performant features.