Founding Software Engineer

Robo (https://robo.tech) is the AI-native engine for evaluating therapeutic programs in pharma. We’re building critical infrastructure for $1B+ companies, giving them a system that powers decisions around in-licensing, competitive intelligence, and R&D.

We believe the ability to identify, evaluate, and decide on the right programs to pursue will become increasingly fundamental to bringing more and better drugs to patients—and to realizing the potential of AI in human health.

Our customers today include teams at leading pharma companies, and we’re expanding rapidly within and across customers. We have an incredible group of investors and advisors, and our founding team has decades of experience building software used by millions of scientists.

# About the role

We’re looking for a Founding Engineer (Staff-level) to help steer our technical foundation as we scale. You’ll be deeply hands-on while owning major technical decisions, shaping how we build, and helping define the engineering culture of the company.

We’re early adopters and heavy users of AI in how we build software. AI agents are an integral part of our development process, and we’re constantly exploring what becomes possible when you treat them as more than coding copilots. You should already be excited about working this way and pushing that frontier with us.

You’ll work across the product and infrastructure behind Robo: from the agent systems that research and evaluate therapeutic programs, to the data and orchestration layer underneath them, to the interfaces our customers use every day.

You will:

• Own important and complex systems end-to-end. Take ambiguous problems from first principles through architecture, implementation, deployment, and operation.
• Build infrastructure for production-grade AI agents. Work on long-running agent workflows, tool use, orchestration, state machines, queues, retries, failure recovery, evals, tracing, and the systems that make AI outputs trustworthy.
• Shape the technical architecture of Robo. Make consequential decisions across our backend, data model, APIs, infrastructure, and developer platform.
• Work closely with product and customers. Understand the problems our users are trying to solve and translate them into simple, powerful product and technical systems.
• Raise the engineering bar. Help define how we approach system design, testing, observability, code review, reliability, and technical decision-making.
• Help build the engineering team. Mentor other engineers, contribute to hiring, and help establish the culture and practices of the team we’re building in Berlin.

You do not need to have worked with the exact technologies in our stack. We care much more about strong engineering judgment and your track record.

# What we're looking for

We’re looking for an exceptional engineer with:

• A demonstrated track record designing, building, and operating complex production systems.
• Strong backend and systems fundamentals: distributed workflows, concurrency, queues, retries, idempotency, caching, data modeling, migrations, observability, and failure modes.
• Experience operating at Staff Engineer level, or evidence that you have already owned problems with similar scope, complexity, and ambiguity.
• Strong product judgment. You care about what gets built and why, not just how it gets implemented.
• The ability to move comfortably between architecture and implementation. You still want to spend a meaningful amount of your time writing code.
• High standards for software quality, paired with good judgment about the realities of startups and when to optimize for speed and simplicity.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to make technical tradeoffs clear to engineers and non-engineers alike.
• A demonstrated interest in applied AI, particularly in how AI is changing the way software gets built.
• Genuine curiosity about drug development and how therapeutic programs are evaluated. You don’t need previous pharma experience, but you should want to become deeply knowledgeable about the domain.

# Details

Robo is a remote-first company headquartered in California and we're establishing our engineering base in Berlin. This is a hybrid role requiring you to be located in Berlin, Germany and to expect to work in person 1–2 days per week. It's totally fine if you can't do that every week, though.

We offer:

• Meaningful founding-team equity
• Above-market salary
• Significant influence over a product and technical architecture at an early stage
• Work closely with the founders and have outsized ownership over the company we build

If this resonates, let's chat!