About Careertakes

👉 Important disclosure: Careertakes is a third-party recruiting platform supporting this hiring process. If selected, you will be employed directly by our client, Robotics Engineering.

Applicants for this role may also receive access to additional matched opportunities through the Careertakes platform.

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About the role

Confidential Client is building robots that learn from real-world experience. The Data Platform team turns raw sensor captures into training-ready data: ingesting multi-source sensor streams, validating and curating data for quality and diversity, powering annotation workflows, and building automated methods to reduce manual labeling over time.

This is an early, hands-on, 0→1 engineering role. You will be one of the founding engineers owning the application layer of the data platform and will work closely with research, product, and annotation partners to productionize pipelines used in training robotic systems.

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What You’ll Do

• Build and harden data ingestion pipelines that collect captures from field sites, teleop stacks, and other sources.
• Design and implement automatic data validation to catch quality issues before data reaches annotation or training.
• Own annotation ingestion, tooling, and workflows to improve labeling efficiency and throughput.
• Define and track data-quality and diversity metrics — identify gaps and drive targeted data collection.
• Prototype and integrate automated annotation methods (CV and vision-language models) to reduce manual labeling over time.
• Operate and support live pipelines: debug issues, add observability, and collaborate directly with research and annotation teams.

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Minimum Qualifications

• 2+ years of software engineering experience building production systems.
• Strong programming fundamentals and comfort across the stack: services, data pipelines, and applied-ML tooling.
• Experience in at least one of the following: real-time or large-scale data pipelines, ML data workflows, computer vision, or data infrastructure.
• Track record of ownership: taking systems from prototype to production and supporting them in the field.
• Clear communicator who partners closely with product, research, and annotation/operations teams.

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Preferred / Nice-to-have

• Hands-on experience with sensor data (video, depth, IMU, force/torque) and the infrastructure to process, validate, and label it at scale.
• Experience with streaming or near-real-time data pipelines.
• Familiarity with ML data workflows: dataset management, labeling pipelines, and evaluation.
• Experience running or integrating computer vision or vision-language models (depth, pose/hand tracking, open-vocabulary detection, auto-labeling).

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Why Join

• Influence core infrastructure that directly impacts model quality and robot behavior.
• Work at the intersection of software engineering and applied ML in robotics.
• Cross-functional collaboration with research and operations — see the end-to-end impact of your work.

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Location & Employment Type

• This role is based in Palo Alto, CA.
• Employment type: Full-time.

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Equal Opportunity & Hiring Transparency

Careertakes and our client are Equal Opportunity Employers committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce. We prohibit discrimination or harassment of any kind. To support a fair and efficient hiring process, AI tools may be used to assist with application review or resume screening. These tools do not replace human decision-making. Final hiring decisions are made by people.

If you have questions about how your data is used, please contact us directly.