Robotics Platform Engineer

Confirmed live in the last 24 hours

Formic

Compensation

$145,000 - $200,000/year

San Francisco || Oakland, CA

Hybrid

Posted March 27, 2026

Job Description

Who we are:

Formic is on a mission to reshape American manufacturing by making automation accessible to every factory. As labor constraints rise, costs increase, and global competition intensifies, automation is no longer optional for manufacturers that want to stay competitive.

We deliver automation through a Robotics-as-a-Service model that combines industrial robotics, proprietary software, and full-service support into a single, integrated solution. By removing the traditional barriers of cost, complexity, and risk, we enable manufacturers to deploy automation quickly and realize measurable gains in throughput, safety, and operational efficiency without large upfront capital investment.

Backed by leading investors including Lux Capital, Initialized Capital, Blackhorn Ventures, and Mitsubishi HC Capital North America, Formic is scaling rapidly and building the foundation for a new era of high-performance, Made in America production.

About the team:

The Software Engineering Team builds and operates the systems that power Formic’s Robotics-as-a-Service platform.

Engineering focuses on ensuring deployed systems are observable, resilient, and remotely diagnosable at scale. The team builds production-grade edge and cloud systems that support reliable data collection, remote troubleshooting, live video streaming, and continuous system improvement.

This work directly impacts fleet uptime, service efficiency, and customer outcomes by ensuring Formic’s monitoring and control infrastructure remains scalable, reliable, and continuously evolving.

About this role:

As a Robotics Platform Engineer, you will design and maintain the distributed software architecture that powers Formic’s next-generation robotic platforms. You will build the infrastructure that connects simulation, training, deployment, monitoring, and real-world execution into a unified production system.

This role sits at the core of embodied AI deployment. You will ensure robotic systems are reproducible, observable, scalable, and reliable across both simulation environments and physical hardware.

In this role you will:

Design and maintain distributed robotics software architecture across edge and cloud environments
Build middleware and data pipelines supporting real-time robotic systems
Develop logging, replay, and observability tools for debugging and performance analysis
Build scalable data infrastructure to support AI training workflows and dataset management
Implement model versioning, deployment, and rollback mechanisms for robotic policies
Optimize system performance and latency across distributed compute nodes
Develop CI/CD pipelines supporting simulation, hardware testing, and production releases
Enable reproducible experimentation across simulation and real-world deployments
Support integration between perception, control, and learning subsystems

What makes you a great fit:

5+ years of experience in robotics software, autonomous systems, or high-performance distributed systems
Strong C++ and systems programming expertise
Experience with ROS2, DDS, and real-time Linux environments
Experience building distributed, latency-sensitive, or high-performance systems
Familiarity with GPU compute environments and machine learning training pipelines
Strong DevOps, CI/CD, and infrastructure automation experience
Experience supporting production-grade systems beyond research prototypes
Based in or willing to relocate to the Greater San Francisco Bay Area and able to wo