Staff Robot Platform Engineer

Persona AI Inc•Houston, TX

3d•Onsite

About The Position

Persona AI is building humanoid robots for demanding environments in heavy industry, such as shipyards, steel mills, fabrication facilities, and offshore platforms. These robots will perform tasks like welding, grinding, maintenance, inspection, and material handling, which are dangerous, physically demanding, and difficult to staff. The company is backed by leading investors and has relationships with global industrial leaders. Persona AI's work encompasses both the robot platform itself and the systems, partners, and strategies required for large-scale deployment, with an initial commercial focus in Korea.

Requirements

8+ years in systems/embedded/real-time software engineering, with meaningful time in robotics, autonomous vehicles, or another hard real-time domain.
Deep C++ fluency and comfort reasoning about real-time constraints, latency budgets, and determinism.
Hands-on EtherCAT experience (master implementation, PDO/SDO, cyclic vs. acyclic data) or an equivalent fieldbus/deterministic networking background.
A track record designing clean hardware abstraction layers, backend-agnostic interfaces, and/or public-facing SDKs or APIs that held up across hardware revisions or product generations.
A bias toward architecturally simple, verifiable systems, and comfort pushing back on unvalidated assumptions in design review.
Bachelor’s Degree in computer science or related field.

Nice To Haves

Rust
Zenoh
Jetson/embedded GPU platforms
momentum-observer or F/T-based force estimation
Pinocchio or similar dynamics libraries

Responsibilities

Build and harden the real-time control loops that turn high-level commands into coordinated joint motion, with hard timing guarantees and deterministic execution from the actuator level up through whole-body behavior.
Own the hardware abstraction layer end to end (cyclic data paths, synchronization and timing constraints, and fault recovery), so perception, planning, and behaviors never have to care which actuator, sensor, or hardware generation sits underneath.
Design and evolve the robot API/SDK (the interface every downstream team programs against), with an eye toward long-term stability, clean versioning, and abstraction boundaries that hold up as the hardware evolves.
Own the messaging layer connecting every on-robot process, with low-latency, deterministic delivery guarantees.
Build the diagnostics and health-monitoring hooks (fault detection, state reporting, and safe paths for degraded operation) that let every other team trust what the platform tells them about the robot's state.
Set technical direction for platform architecture (interface boundaries, backend abstractions, design reviews) and mentor engineers across the team.