About Exclaim Robotics
We're a small robotics company building robots to maintain critical infrastructure, starting with data centers.
Compute density in AI data centers is skyrocketing, which is forcing changes to rack dimensions and cooling, and above all to power. Those changes make a rack a worse place for a person to work. Most of the data center is controlled remotely anyway, so the physical tasks that remain are small and very precise: replacing an optical network connector without dislodging its neighbors, reconfiguring copper wiring, and replacing NVMe drives exactly straight, all through a mess of cables. The robot has to be reliable enough that people trust it near a rack that costs millions of dollars.
We're in pre-seed, and everything is still being built: the team, the company, the robots. If that sounds exciting rather than worrying, this might be the right place for you!
What You'd Be Doing
You'd be our first hardware engineer, and the robot's body would be yours to build: an omnidirectional base that can get itself down a rack aisle and then hold still while an arm works, a lift to reach the top of a rack from the floor, the grippers on the end, and the electrical design and battery system underneath all of it. Robot arms are on order.
The interesting question, and the one we'd want you chasing, is how much of this is really a mechanical problem. Plenty of what the field treats as perception or learning problems can often be solved with better damping, a compliant wrist, or a jig, and we'd like to know how far that goes before we reach for a model. Maybe one gripper handles every task, maybe each task wants its own; we don't know yet, and finding out is the job.
If you have a crazy idea and a safe one, we want to spend a week trying the crazy one first. Most of what you build will be wrong the first time, and we'd rather find that out early.
What You Need to Bring:
Enough hardware prototyping behind you to have owned a design from sketch to working hardware. Show us a portfolio or side projects. An engineering degree would be nice, but applied experience is nicer.
Mechanical design and fabrication you're fast at: CAD, 3D printing, machining, whatever gets a working part into your hand soonest.
Enough electrical to own the system without making a mess of it: motors and drivers, power distribution, sizing a battery and choosing a BMS, and wiring a prototype yourself. You don't need to lay out boards.
Experience working alongside controls, perception, or software engineers. You'd be building the thing they have to make move, and it helps to already know what they'll ask you for.
Having shipped a complex electromechanical product is a big bonus, though not a requirement.
You'd be a good culture fit for us if:
You like working closely with a small team
You can take on a task you have no idea how to do, and figure it out as you go along
You're comfortable giving and receiving honest feedback
You care more about the robot working than about being right
You're good at figuring out what needs to be done and doing it, rather than waiting to be told what to do or asking for permission
Having an office dog isn't a deal-breaker
You think joining an early-stage start-up will be a fun adventure :)
Don't look like a typical robotics engineer? Non-traditional background? Good. We're not really traditional either.