Founding Communications Engineer

We are seeking a Founding Communications Engineer to own the design and delivery of a low-latency, international communications framework that enables remote teleoperators to seamlessly control our robots and collect data in real time. This is a hands-on, high-impact role where you will work closely with our multidisciplinary team to build a truly exceptional, deployment ready, robot.

Location & Working Setup:

You must be willing to relocate to San Francisco by March 30 and work in-person from a shared live/work environment. We call it a hacker house. It’s a focused, high-output environment built around shipping. We can help with visas if you are from the UK or EU.

What you will own:

Design and ship a global, low-latency communications stack for real-time robot teleoperation (control, video, depth, point clouds, telemetry).

Select and justify transports/protocols using measured latency, reliability, and operational constraints.

Implement resilience: congestion control, adaptive bitrate, loss recovery (FEC/retransmit), and regional failover.

Ensure real-world connectivity: NAT traversal, TURN/STUN, edge/relay topology.

Define serialization, timing, and synchronization for tight control loops and multi-sensor alignment.

Instrument and benchmark end-to-end performance (latency, jitter, loss, tail metrics, budgets).

Own security primitives: authentication, encryption, key management, secure tunnels.

Debug distributed production failures and deploy fixes with minimal disruption.

Work tightly with VR, controls, and hardware teams; maintain clear architecture and operational docs.

What we’re looking for

• Strong focus on building excellent real-time communications systems.

• Proven experience shipping low-latency networking systems (teleop, live video, cloud gaming, or similar).

• Deep understanding of real-time transport (UDP, QUIC, RTP/RTCP, WebRTC, congestion control).

• Strong systems programming skills in C++.

• Hands-on experience with low-latency media pipelines and encoders (GPU/software).

• Experience operating global services and measuring region-to-region performance.

• Solid security fundamentals (TLS/mTLS, auth, key management).

• Experience with observability, load testing, and defining SLIs/SLOs.

• Excellent incident debugging and technical documentation.

• Required:

• Portfolio of relevant work and projects (heavily weighted).

• Desirable:

• Experience with ROS2 and bridging robot sensor data to external clients.

• Background in real-time systems or low-latency media for VR headsets or edge devices.

• Strong interest in robotics.

• We move fast. If you meet the bar and can relocate by March 30, 2026, apply now.