Staff Backend Robotics Engineer

About This Role

Service to Success is supporting a well-funded robotics and AI startup building autonomous manufacturing systems designed to solve one of the most important challenges facing American industry: how to dramatically increase manufacturing output without increasing headcount.

The company is developing the intelligence layer that allows industrial machines and robotic systems to operate autonomously, helping manufacturers scale production in labor-constrained environments. Their work sits at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, distributed systems, and advanced manufacturing.

Backed by leading investors and already delivering technology into highly demanding environments, the team is still small enough that every engineer has outsized influence on product direction, architecture, and technical decisions.

This is an opportunity to join at an early stage and help build foundational systems that will directly shape the future of autonomous manufacturing.

Compensation: $200K–$250K Base + Significant Equity

The Role

This is not a typical backend engineering role.

The team is looking for an engineer who enjoys building production systems around real-world hardware, sensor data, and machine intelligence. You will own critical infrastructure that powers machine learning workflows, robotics platforms, and large-scale sensor data pipelines.

You'll work directly with company leadership and ML engineers to build the systems that collect, store, process, and serve massive amounts of robotics and manufacturing data.

Success in this role requires someone who is comfortable operating close to hardware, understands the challenges of real-time and high-volume sensor data, and can build scalable systems that enable rapid experimentation and deployment.

What You'll Work On

• Own and scale the data collection, storage, and processing pipeline for robotics sensor data
• Build backend infrastructure supporting machine learning training, evaluation, and deployment workflows
• Design distributed systems capable of handling high-volume sensor, video, and machine telemetry data
• Make key architectural decisions around storage, processing, analytics, and infrastructure
• Partner closely with robotics and machine learning engineers to accelerate model development and iteration cycles
• Build production systems that connect physical machines, sensors, and software into a unified platform
• Improve reliability, scalability, observability, and performance across core backend services
• Work across cloud, edge, and hardware-connected environments

Requirements

• 7+ years of backend or infrastructure engineering experience
• Strong experience building production data pipelines and distributed systems
• Hands-on experience working with sensor data, machine telemetry, video pipelines, robotics data, industrial systems, or similar real-world data sources
• Strong Python experience required
• Experience with Rust, C++, or other systems-level languages strongly preferred
• Experience building scalable infrastructure for machine learning, analytics, or large-scale data processing workloads
• Understanding of latency-sensitive systems and the challenges of integrating software with physical hardware
• Comfortable operating in a startup environment with high ownership and limited bureaucracy
• Ability to work onsite in New York City

Strongly Preferred

• Robotics, manufacturing, industrial automation, autonomous systems, computer vision, or defense technology experience
• Experience working with time-series databases, telemetry systems, sensor fusion pipelines, or video processing infrastructure
• Experience supporting ML infrastructure, GPU workloads, or large-scale training pipelines
• Startup experience building products from the ground up