Founding Communications Engineer

We are seeking a Founding Communications Engineer to own the design and delivery of a low-latency, international communications framework that enables remote teleoperators to seamlessly control our robots and collect data in real time. This is a hands-on, high-impact role where you will work closely with our multidisciplinary team to build a truly exceptional, deployment ready, robot.

Location & Working Setup:

You must be willing to relocate to San Francisco by March 30 for 3 months and work in-person from a shared live/work environment. We call it a hacker house. It’s a focused, high-output environment built around shipping. We can help with visas if you are from the UK or EU.

What you will own:

• Design and ship a global, low-latency communications stack for real-time robot teleoperation (control, video, depth, point clouds, telemetry).
• Select and justify transports/protocols using measured latency, reliability, and operational constraints.
• Implement resilience: congestion control, adaptive bitrate, loss recovery (FEC/retransmit), and regional failover.
• Ensure real-world connectivity: NAT traversal, TURN/STUN, edge/relay topology.
• Define serialization, timing, and synchronization for tight control loops and multi-sensor alignment.
• Instrument and benchmark end-to-end performance (latency, jitter, loss, tail metrics, budgets).
• Own security primitives: authentication, encryption, key management, secure tunnels.
• Debug distributed production failures and deploy fixes with minimal disruption.
• Work tightly with VR, controls, and hardware teams; maintain clear architecture and operational docs.

What we’re looking for:

• Strong focus on building excellent real-time communications systems.
• Proven experience shipping low-latency networking systems (teleop, live video, cloud gaming, or similar).
• Deep understanding of real-time transport (UDP, QUIC, RTP/RTCP, WebRTC, congestion control).
• Strong systems programming skills in C++.
• Hands-on experience with low-latency media pipelines and encoders (GPU/software).
• Experience operating global services and measuring region-to-region performance.
• Solid security fundamentals (TLS/mTLS, auth, key management).
• Experience with observability, load testing, and defining SLIs/SLOs.
• Excellent incident debugging and technical documentation.

Required:

• Portfolio of relevant work and projects (heavily weighted).

Desirable:

• Experience with ROS2 and bridging robot sensor data to external clients.
• Background in real-time systems or low-latency media for VR headsets or edge devices.
• Strong interest in robotics.

We move fast. If you meet the bar and can relocate by March 30, 2026, apply now.