Senior Software Engineer, Robot Data Collection

Welocalize • San Francisco, CA

1d

About The Position

GEAR Lab builds robot foundation models using data collected daily on real robots. The Senior Software Engineer will own the system behind that operation, including the collection platform, operator tooling, data pipeline, and fleet. This is an engineering role; a dedicated team performs day-to-day teleoperation, and the engineer directs that team while building and maintaining the systems they use and taking responsibility for the resulting data.

The role includes designing, building, and maintaining software for data collection stations; deploying and upgrading the stack across the fleet while keeping collection running; managing data validation, conversion, upload, metadata, and versioning; and developing quality-assurance tooling. The engineer will direct and support teleoperators, maintain fleet reliability, bring up new stations and robot embodiments, and report collection throughput, yield, and data health to the research team.

Requirements

• Master’s degree in computer science, robotics, electrical or mechanical engineering, or a related field; alternatively, a bachelor’s degree with equivalent hands-on experience.
• At least 3 years building software for real robot systems; simulation-only experience does not meet this requirement.
• A system designed and shipped for daily use by others, with responsibility for keeping it running.
• Strong Python and Linux skills, plus experience with Docker, Git, CI, and SSH-based fleet administration.
• Experience with robot middleware and real-time multi-sensor recording, such as ROS 2 or equivalent vendor SDKs.
• Experience supporting a data collection or teleoperation operation, including building operator tools and owning throughput and quality metrics.
• Comfort with robot hardware, including arms or humanoids, dexterous hands, RGB-D cameras, and calibration.
• Ability to lead operators without formal authority, write clear SOPs, train people, and communicate status proactively.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with humanoid or bimanual platforms such as Unitree, Fourier, or ALOHA/ARX-class rigs, and dexterous hands.
• Experience with XR teleoperation, including Quest, PICO, or Vision Pro; motion-capture gloves; or whole-body retargeting.
• Experience with imitation-learning data tooling, such as LeRobot, HDF5/Zarr episode stores, dataset versioning, or S3 at TB–PB scale.
• Experience building internal dashboards or tooling for a production line or high-throughput lab.
• Open-source contributions to robotics data or teleoperation tooling.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain data collection station software, including the teleoperation stack, multi-camera recording, and session tooling.
• Deploy and upgrade the software stack across the fleet without interrupting collection, and maintain workstation, container, and network health.
• Own the end-to-end data pipeline, including automated validation, conversion to the dataset format, upload, metadata, and versioning.
• Build quality-assurance tooling to detect dropped frames, stream desynchronization, poor calibration, and mislabeled episodes before data reaches training.
• Direct teleoperators by defining task protocols and SOPs, onboarding them on new tasks and embodiments, reviewing session quality, and resolving daily blockers.
• Maintain fleet reliability through calibration and firmware pipelines, sensor and end-effector integration, root-cause analysis of recurring faults, and vendor escalation.
• Bring up new stations and embodiments, and report throughput, yield, and data health to the research team.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior