Cargo Robotics: Founding Engineer / First Hire

About You

Are you a rockstar developer? We’re a bada** team of serial founders who are Stanford / StartX / South Park Commons alumni and are well funded with awesome robotics founders and investors behind us. We’ve got business and hardware covered, and we’re looking for an awesome software lead - someone with the ambition and versatility to join as a first employee at a robotics startup disrupting a massive legacy industry.

We have a strong preference for candidates who can work locally with us in the SF Bay to enable tight collaboration and fast iteration.

About Us

Cargo is building the robotic delivery platform of tomorrow. You can think of us as an automated warehouse on wheels.

After taking jobs at UPS and FedEx, we realized that the last mile was broken and parcel delivery needed a new approach. Although delivery volumes have grown 5x in the past decade, delivery vans are stuck in 1950 and today’s process is highly inefficient and injury prone. Our first product is the X1 Robotic Cargo Bay which reimagines the guts of every delivery van you see on the road, and saves hours of labor per day for each vehicle.

Our vision is to fully automate the delivery chain with radically more efficient networks that reduce carbon emissions and congestion while enabling people and our planet to thrive.

We’re looking for an unstoppable and versatile first hire to lead software development for the pilot launch of X1. You’ll then rapidly iterate alongside our CTO and test with our customers to develop a complete V1 product to kick off our next fundraise.

You know how to build and deploy fast, and also how to structure robust systems that hold up to abuse and scale.

Get ready, there’s lots to build :)

What you’ll do

• Kick a**
• Architect, develop, and deploy a wide range of software and cutting-edge algorithms that power our robotic systems. These include:
• Perception (capture package information, and more exciting stuff in the future)
• Motion planning (figuring out how to get packages in and out of cargo bays)
• Storage optimization (how can we fit more packages in there?)
• ML (document edge cases, build more reliable control models)
• Fleet management & diagnostics (find and fix fault conditions, teleoperate, etc.)
• System logging and messaging (measure performance and driver behaviors to prove the value of our technology)
• User interface (app enabling customers to interact with our product)
• Customer integration (interface legacy software for a seamless experience)
• Act as a thought partner to the founders and help shape our vision and roadmap
• Collaborate tightly with our hardware team to identify cross functional dependencies and build the best possible product
• Help to source and manage junior teammates as well as contract team members for speciality skills
• This is an IC role with the potential to grow into helping manage the software team as we grow

You need to bring this:

• BS in Computer Science, CS, CE, EE, Robotics, or related field (minimum)
• 5 or more years of hands-on experience in software engineering developing robotic systems with experience shipping into production environments
• Strong software development skills in C++ and Python for complex function-based software that interacts with sensor inputs, control loops, and redundancy
• Experience in core robotics technologies and software development including:
• Control theory and algorithms (PID control, adaptive control, robust control)
• Computer vision (object detection, segmentation, text and dimensional capture)
• Behavior planning and recommendation systems (e.g., deep reinforcement learning, Markov Decision Processes)
• Robotics simulation tools and frameworks (e.g., ROS, Gazebo, Drake, V-REP)
• Networking and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP or Azure)
• Ability to hack together web applications and UIs
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and leadership skills, with the ability to inspire and motivate teams to achieve ambitious goals
• You have the experience to quickly build and iterate across the stack, with the wisdom to balance speed and quality tradeoffs appropriately