Member of Technical Staff: Robot Systems

Pantheon's mission is to build and deploy billions of useful robots, starting with bi-manual manipulators for manufacturing, where there exists a $1.3T U.S. labor market with 439k+ unfilled jobs and brittle existing automation built with gaps humans have to fill. Long term, we're building toward a software-defined world: one where you can build a skyscraper with a prompt, the same way you build a web app with Claude today.

Getting there requires treating deployable robots as a full-stack problem, where hardware reliability shapes what the ML stack compensates for, and ML requirements shape the hardware we build. As such we co-design ML, hardware, and deployments end-to-end. The team executing this comes from OpenAI, xAI, Zoox, Mercor, Ramp, and Founders Fund, led by founders who sold companies at 16 and ran the German division of Cambridge Aerospace.

About the role

Every ML system depends on hardware that actually works: robot arms that are calibrated, teleoperation systems that are reliable, and new hardware integrated quickly for experiments and deployments.

This role owns the layer between physical hardware and software infrastructure. You will take new robot arms, haptic devices, teleoperation rigs, and sensor systems and turn them into reliable systems usable by research and deployment teams.

You’ll be responsible for:

• Owning integration of robot hardware including arms, hands, teleoperation rigs, haptic devices, and sensor systems.

• Building and maintaining teleoperation systems, operator tooling, and hardware control interfaces.

• Developing software interfaces, drivers, and abstraction layers connecting hardware to ML training and data pipelines.

• Setting up, calibrating, and maintaining hardware rigs for reliable day-to-day operation and data collection.

• Debugging hardware-software integration issues across drivers, communication protocols, calibration systems, and physical hardware.

• Partnering closely with ML and hardware teams to rapidly integrate and operationalize new hardware capabilities.

• Building tooling for hardware health monitoring, diagnostics, observability, and operational reliability.

You will thrive in this role if you:

• Enjoy getting real hardware systems working reliably and debugging across hardware and software boundaries.

• Are a strong software engineer comfortable working with hardware SDKs, communication protocols, and physical systems.

• Have experience integrating robots, sensors, peripherals, or other hardware systems into reliable software stacks.

• Move quickly with strong ownership instincts and are comfortable operating in ambiguous environments.

• Understand what ML teams need from hardware systems and build integrations that are clean, observable, and easy to iterate on.

Bonus points if you have:

• Experience at a robotics, autonomous systems, or hardware-focused company or research lab.

• Hands-on experience with teleoperation systems, motion capture, haptic devices, or dexterous manipulation hardware.

• Familiarity with robot SDKs, ROS (Robot Operating System), or robotics middleware.

• Experience building calibration, synchronization, or sensor alignment systems for robotics data collection.

• Experience working closely with ML researchers to prototype and deploy new hardware systems quickly.