Founding Engineer (Extraordinary Ability)

Founding Engineer role at Gradient Robotics across Mechanical, ML, or Software tracks. You’ll make high-stakes design decisions that shape the company’s robotics stack, ship code, mechanisms, or models to real robots operating in real environments, and iterate rapidly across generations. Responsibilities include end-to-end mechanical design (kinematics, DFMA, multi-physics simulation, FEA), ML model development (data collection, pre-training, fine-tuning, RL-based self-improvement), or software integration (kernel/firmware to autonomy stack) with a focus on delivering deployable robotics systems. Candidates should demonstrate extraordinary technical capability with strong foundations in one focus area, experience translating ideas from simulations to hardware, and the ability to work in a US-based startup environment pursuing O-1A immigration support. Strong emphasis on impactful contributions, open-source or production-grade work, and the ability to ship daily to physical robots. US office-based, located in San Francisco, CA.