Tech Lead, Robotics Runtime & Middleware

Mind Robotics • Palo Alto, CA

5d

About The Position

At Mind Robotics, we're building generalized physical AI — robotic systems capable of dexterous, adaptive, and reasoning-intensive work in real-world industrial environments. That depends on a runtime platform that lets robots perceive, decide, and act under hard real-time constraints.
We're looking for a Tech Lead to lead the development for this runtime: how the robotics and AI modules communicate and execute under tight latency budgets. This is an IC-heavy role: you're in the codebase daily, making the hard latency and correctness tradeoffs yourself, not delegating them.
This is a role for someone who wants to own the hardest problems in real-time robotics software and onboard model serving, and ship them personally.

Requirements

• Strong systems programming in Python and/or Rust
• Hands-on experience with robotics middleware — ROS2 (rclcpp/rclpy, DDS implementations like Fast DDS/CycloneDDS, or Zenoh), including designing custom message types, QoS tuning, and multi-node communication patterns
• Real-time systems experience: understanding of scheduling, latency budgets, jitter, and the difference between soft and hard real-time guarantees; comfort with RTOS concepts
• Experience with embedded/edge Linux — cross-compilation, device driver basics, and resource-constrained execution (CPU/memory/power budgets)
• Multi-sensor synchronization: time sync protocols (PTP/gPTP), sensor fusion pipelines, and handling clock drift/skew across distributed compute on a single robot
• Model deployment/inference optimization: exporting and running models via ONNX Runtime, TensorRT, or similar; quantization and batching strategies for action-model inference on edge compute; understanding of how model latency translates into control-loop constraints
• Experience with control systems and motion primitives — enough to reason about how software architecture decisions (message latency, action chunking, control frequency) affect closed-loop robot behavior
• Track record of taking real-time systems from prototype to reliable, continuous operation on physical hardware
• Strong technical judgment on tradeoffs between research/experimentation velocity (fast iteration, permissive interfaces) and runtime reliability (determinism, fault tolerance, safety margins)
• Comfort making build-vs-buy calls on middleware and compute hardware
• Clear communicator who can work directly with research/modeling partners to translate model requirements into runtime architecture, without a layer of translation in between

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with simulation environments (Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, Gazebo) for validating runtime behavior before field deployment
• Exposure to functional safety concepts relevant to physical systems
• Background in autonomous vehicles, industrial IoT, or other domains with similar real-time/embedded constraints
• Experience scaling a runtime platform from a handful of robots to many concurrent units in production
• Some prior experience providing technical mentorship or informal lead direction to other engineers, without formal management responsibility

Responsibilities

• Design and build the robotics runtime/middleware layer – including topic/message architecture, QoS policies, and multi-process communication under tight latency budgets
• Own the inference-serving path for onboard models (VLA/action-expert policies): batching, quantization, hardware acceleration, and the tradeoffs between model accuracy and control-loop latency
• Architect multi-sensor synchronization and fusion arriving on different clocks and cadences, kept coherent enough for closed-loop control
• Make and own the hard technical calls on middleware choice, process/thread architecture, and how much real-time guarantee any given subsystem actually needs
• Set technical standards and do deep design/code review across runtime engineering
• Prototype and de-risk new architecture directions (new middleware, new compute hardware, new model-serving approaches) before they become team-wide commitments
• Work directly with modeling/research to understand what a policy actually needs from the runtime (latency, synchronization, action representation) and make sure the platform delivers it

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed