Robotics Product Engineer

Robotics Product Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA (Onsite – 5 Days/Week)

Compensation: $225,000–$275,000 Base + Equity

Industry: Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, AI Infrastructure

About the Opportunity

Shields Group Search is partnering with an innovative, early-stage AI infrastructure startup in San Francisco to hire a Robotics Product Engineer.

The company is building the infrastructure layer that enables developers and robotics teams to integrate, deploy, and run cutting-edge AI world models in real-world applications.

While research labs are developing increasingly sophisticated world models, getting these models to operate efficiently in production remains a significant technical challenge. The company is solving this problem by building the inference infrastructure, SDKs, and deployment capabilities that allow developers to integrate world models into their products without having to build the underlying infrastructure themselves.

Rather than focusing primarily on training foundation models from scratch, the engineering team works at the intersection of AI inference, cloud infrastructure, real-time systems, and applied research, collaborating with research labs to make emerging models usable in production.

Its technical team brings experience building sophisticated, low-latency, real-time systems at major technology organizations, applying that expertise to the emerging world-model ecosystem.

The company operates with a highly technical, talent-dense, flat engineering structure, where individual contributors have significant autonomy and ownership over what they build.

About the Role

We're seeking a Robotics Product Engineer to help bridge the gap between cutting-edge robotics research and real-world deployment.

Robotics teams want to run the newest AI models on physical robots. This engineer will build the products, integrations, and infrastructure that make that possible.

The role has two primary areas of focus:

1. Customer-Facing Product Engineering

Work directly with robotics customers to understand their challenges, investigate technical failures, identify bottlenecks, and translate real-world feedback into meaningful product improvements, new features, and platform capabilities.

2. Research-to-Production Engineering

Collaborate closely with the company's growing robotics research team to take new research, models, and algorithms and get them running reliably on physical robotic systems.

This is a highly hands-on, individual contributor position with significant end-to-end ownership, spanning frontend development, backend engineering, APIs, infrastructure, robotic systems, and physical hardware testing.

The company has physical robots in its San Francisco office, and this engineer will be directly involved in testing and validating software on those systems until a dedicated test engineer joins the team.

The company is also exploring a nearby robotics partnership that could provide access to an entire floor of robotic arms for further testing, deployment, and experimentation.

You'll report directly to the CTO and work within a flat, collaborative engineering organization that prioritizes autonomy, technical excellence, and shipping real products over unnecessary hierarchy or bureaucracy.

Key Responsibilities

• Robotics Customer Collaboration: Work directly with robotics customers to investigate failures, understand technical challenges, and identify what would make their workflows easier, faster, and more effective.
• Research Productization: Collaborate with robotics researchers to translate experimental models, algorithms, and research breakthroughs into functioning software deployed on physical robots.
• Full-Stack Product Development: Design, build, and ship features across web interfaces, backend services, APIs, and infrastructure. Determine when a problem requires a quick fix, a dedicated feature, or a foundational platform improvement.
• Robotics Systems Debugging: Investigate and resolve complex technical issues spanning robotic software, networking, cloud infrastructure, and model inference.
• Simulation & Visualization: Develop simulation environments, interactive visualization tools, and interfaces that allow customers to configure environments, inspect robotic behavior, and test learned policies.
• Physical Robot Testing: Work directly with robotic hardware in the San Francisco office to test model deployments, validate system performance, troubleshoot integration issues, and improve reliability in real-world environments.

Required Qualifications

• Production Software Engineering: Proven experience taking software products from initial concept through development, deployment, and adoption by real users.
• Hands-On Robotics Experience: Recent, practical experience working with robotic systems. Extensive robotics tenure is not required; approximately two years of meaningful, hands-on robotics experience can be sufficient, particularly when combined with strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Full-Stack Engineering: Demonstrated ability to build across frontend applications, backend systems, APIs, and infrastructure. Candidates should be comfortable owning products end to end rather than specializing exclusively in one layer.
• Customer-Facing Product Development: Experience working directly with users or customers to understand their needs, conduct user research, investigate technical problems, and determine what should be built.
• Research-to-Production Collaboration: Experience partnering with researchers to transform research, experimental technologies, or new models into functional, production-ready software.
• Strong Technical Ownership: Ability to work independently, make engineering decisions, navigate ambiguity, and take responsibility for delivering complete solutions.
• Hands-On Individual Contributor Mindset: Genuine enthusiasm for building, debugging, testing, and shipping software rather than managing a team of engineers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience deploying learned models, machine learning systems, or robotic policies onto physical robots.
• Familiarity with ROS 2, MuJoCo, or NVIDIA Isaac Sim.
• Experience building interactive 3D applications, browser-based graphics, visualization tools, or simulation interfaces.
• Exposure to robotics policy serving, teleoperation systems, and evaluation workflows.
• Experience working across robotics software, cloud infrastructure, networking, and inference systems.
• Background integrating emerging AI research or machine learning models into customer-facing production applications.
• Familiarity with real-time systems, low-latency inference, and AI model deployment infrastructure.
• Prior experience at technically sophisticated AI infrastructure companies, such as Baseten or fal, or organizations solving comparable production inference and deployment challenges.
• Experience at both a large technology organization and an early-stage startup, combining an understanding of engineering at scale with the ability to build quickly in resource-constrained environments.

What We're Looking For

The ideal candidate is a product-minded, full-stack software engineer with recent, hands-on robotics experience and a demonstrated ability to turn complex research into working products.

We're particularly interested in engineers who:

• Have successfully deployed models or learned policies onto real physical robots, rather than exclusively working in simulated environments.
• Have worked closely with researchers to turn experimental technology into deployed, customer-facing software.
• Have recent hands-on robotics experience, even if much of their broader engineering career has been spent in other technical domains.
• Are comfortable moving between frontend development, backend infrastructure, robotics software, and physical hardware.
• Enjoy working directly with customers, understanding their problems, and independently determining how to solve them.
• Can navigate both highly structured engineering environments and ambiguous, fast-moving startups.
• Know when to build scalable engineering systems and when a simpler, faster solution is more appropriate.
• Enjoy hands-on hardware testing, debugging, and solving difficult technical problems.
• Bring a high-agency, low-ego, builder mentality, taking ownership of whatever needs to get done regardless of whether it falls neatly within a traditional job description.

Compensation & Logistics

• Base Salary: $225,000–$275,000
• Equity: Additional equity compensation
• Location: San Francisco, California
• Work Arrangement: Primarily five days per week onsite
• Employment Type: Full-Time
• Reporting Structure: Directly to the CTO
• Visa Sponsorship: Available, including H-1B sponsorship and transfers