FOUNDING ROBOTICS ENGINEER
Autonomous Driving
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ABOUT TESPEN ROBOTICS
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Tespen Robotics is building the autonomous driving layer for public transportation. Founded at UC Berkeley and headquartered in San Francisco (part of Antler SF02 cohort), we are developing Level 4 autonomous driving software for public transit and city-service vehicles, starting with fixed-route operations.
Instead of building another autonomous vehicle from scratch, Tespen is taking a retrofit-first, hardware-agnostic approach: we are building an autonomy stack that can be deployed on the fleets cities and transportation operators already own.
Public transportation is one of the largest and most operationally constrained mobility systems in the world. It is also facing a structural shortage of drivers, rising operating costs, and increasing pressure to provide more frequent and reliable service. We believe autonomy can fundamentally change the economics of running these networks.
Our technology combines perception, localization, planning, control, simulation, and vehicle integration into a route-based autonomy platform designed for repeatable real-world deployment. Tespen works with public-transit operators, research institutions, technology partners, and public-sector organizations across the United States and Europe. Italy is becoming one of our primary engineering and testing environments as we move from simulation toward deployment on real vehicles. We are now building the engineering team that will turn that vision into a production autonomous driving system.
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THE ROLE
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We are looking for a Founding Robotics Engineer to help build the core technology of Tespen from the ground up.
This is not a narrowly scoped engineering position. You will work directly with the founders, take ownership of critical parts of the autonomy stack, and help make fundamental decisions about architecture, algorithms, tooling, testing, and how the engineering organization itself is built. Depending on your background, you may own problems across:
- Planning & Control
- Localization & Mapping
- Perception & Sensor Fusion
- Simulation & Validation
- Robotics Systems
- Vehicle & Sensor Integration
You will work across the full development loop: simulation > prototype > vehicle integration > field testing > iteration.
The goal is simple: build autonomous systems that work outside the lab.
The role will be partially based in Europe, with Italy serving as one of Tespen’s primary engineering and vehicle-testing hubs. For candidates that are open to relocating internationally for a fixed period of time (on a 6 months increment basis) although this is not required, this could be structured as an expat opportunity, with Tespen supporting relocation and, where applicable, immigration and visa requirements. As the company grows, engineers will also have opportunities to work across our European operations and San Francisco headquarters.
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WHAT YOU’LL BUILD
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You may work on problems such as:
- Motion and trajectory planning for constrained urban routes
- Vehicle dynamics and closed-loop control
- Localization, mapping, state estimation, and sensor fusion
- LiDAR, camera, radar, and multi-modal perception
- Prediction and interaction with other road users
- ROS2-based autonomous systems architecture
- Simulation, scenario generation, and autonomous-system validation
- SIL/HIL testing and reproducible testing infrastructure
- Vehicle interfaces, CAN integration, embedded compute, and sensor integration
- Failure analysis using real-world vehicle and sensor data
- Tooling for rapid debugging, deployment, and iteration across the autonomy stack
As one of the first engineers at Tespen, you will also help define how we build robotics software, not simply implement an architecture designed by someone else.
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WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR?
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We care more about technical depth, evidence of building things, and engineering judgment than a particular résumé or number of years of experience.
You might be an exceptional new graduate who has built autonomous robots from scratch. You might be a robotics engineer who has spent years deploying systems in the real world. You might come from autonomous vehicles, mobile robotics, drones, industrial robotics, aerospace, or another field where software ultimately has to make a physical system behave correctly.
Strong candidates will have depth in several of the following:
- C++ and/or Python
- ROS / ROS2
- Motion planning and trajectory generation
- Optimal control, MPC, or vehicle control
- SLAM, localization, mapping, or state estimation
- Computer vision and deep learning
- LiDAR, radar, cameras, and sensor fusion
- Gazebo, CARLA, Isaac Sim, or other robotics simulation environments
- Embedded and real-time systems
- CAN bus and vehicle interfaces
- SIL/HIL testing and autonomous-system validation
- Deployment and debugging of physical robotic systems
A degree in Robotics, Computer Science, Automation, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related discipline is helpful, but exceptional practical experience matters more to us than credentials.
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WHAT MAKES THIS DIFFERENT
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Most robotics engineers join once the architecture, team structure, and technical boundaries have already been defined. At Tespen, they haven’t.
The engineers joining us now will have the opportunity to shape the autonomy stack, choose the tools and technical standards we build around, work directly with real vehicles and transportation operators, and become foundational members of the engineering organization as the company grows.
We are looking for people who want that level of ownership. People who enjoy difficult systems problems. People who are comfortable moving between algorithms, software, hardware, simulation, and a vehicle that is not behaving the way the simulation said it would. And people who want to build technology that will change how millions of people move through cities.
If you have built autonomous robots or vehicles in the real world, even if your background does not match every item above, we want to hear from you!
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COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
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Competitive early-stage cash compensation, with compensation scaling as the company grows:
- Competitive Salary based on qualifications and experience
- Meaningful equity ownership with standard vesting - we want our earliest engineers to participate materially in the value they help create
- Unlimited PTO
- Flexible working arrangements, while maintaining regular hands-on access to vehicles and testing infrastructure
- Direct access to the founding team and significant influence over technical architecture, tooling, and engineering culture
- Support for relocation and visa sponsorship in Europe (and, in the future US, to our San Francisco office) for exceptional candidates, where applicable
- Opportunity to grow into a technical leadership role as the engineering organization scales
We are deliberately keeping the first engineering team small. Early hires will receive meaningful equity and unusually high technical ownership, with the opportunity to grow into leadership roles as Tespen scales.