Senior Software Engineer, Vehicles

About Chip

Chip is the first mass-market American robot. He just happens to be your car.

Chip is building a new category of vehicle. Most cars are engineered for highway
speeds and long-distance range. The reality is that 60% of daily trips are under
6 miles. Chip is built for those trips: fully electric, street-legal on roads up
to 35 mph, 100+ mile range, and made to fit the way people actually move through
their neighborhoods.

We're also launching Chip Go!, a remote-driving service that keeps your
vehicle moving when you're not inside it. Say the word and he'll go off to park
himself, run an errand, get cleaned, or come get you and the family. Rolling out
regionally.

We launched publicly in July 2026 and reservations are open nationally.

The role

We say Chip is a robot rather than an appliance. He has a face. It's made of light, it changes with what he's doing, and his mouth moves when he talks. He has a voice, speakers, microphones, and screens
people reach out and touch. All of that is yours: the animation and expression
system, the audio and video stack, and the infotainment surfaces on board.

The hard part isn't drawing a face. It's landing his mouth on the syllable, on a
moving vehicle, over a network, when the audio and the frames arrive on
different clocks. Get that wrong by 80 milliseconds and he stops reading as
alive and starts reading as a screensaver. Most of this job lives in that gap.

You'll report to the C-suite and work alongside the vehicle team.

The stack

Rust on the vehicle, running Linux on an industrial PC. The face is addressable
LED panels driven over the network. Audio and video move over LiveKit. Expressions are authored as data in an internal editor and compiled into frames the vehicle plays, so a new mood
doesn't require a new build.

None of this is greenfield. There's a working face, a working audio path, and a
compiler that turns authored timelines into frames. There's also a real backlog
of timing, boot-order, and reliability work, which is most of why we're hiring.

What you'll do

• Own Chip's face. The system that decides what he looks like moment to moment, and the arbitration between idle, speaking, and reacting when more than one thing wants his attention.
• Make his mouth match his voice. Viseme timing that holds on a vehicle, over a network, with audio and frames on different clocks and neither of them yours to control.
• Build the animation pipeline. Authored expressions compiled into frames that play without stuttering, so designers ship a new look without an engineer.
• Own the A/V stack on board. Microphones, speakers, gain staging, and the streams that connect a Chip to someone who isn't sitting in it.
• Ship the infotainment surfaces. The screens people actually touch, and everything behind them.
• Keep it real-time. Frame pacing, latency budgets, and the difference between a face that responds and one that arrives a beat late.
• Make it survive a vehicle. Heat, vibration, a network that drops mid-trip, and a boot sequence that has to come up identically every single time.
• Debug the whole path. When his mouth stops moving, you're the person who can say whether it's the audio, the scheduler, the network, or the panel, without handing it to someone else.
• Work with design on what he should feel like. You're the one who knows what's possible at frame rate, and often the one who knows what would be better.

What you'll need

• Five or more years building software, including real production work on embedded, vehicle, or device software.
• Real-time constraints are familiar territory. Frame budgets, jitter, buffering, and clock drift are things you've fought, not things you've read about.
• Systems-level debugging. You can follow a problem across a process boundary, a network hop, and a piece of hardware without losing the thread or the plot.
• You've shipped something people physically used. A device, a vehicle, a kiosk, an installation, something with a screen or a speaker and real users in front of it.
• An opinion about how it should feel. Part of this job is judged on whether he reads as alive, which isn't a metric, and you need taste about it.
• Comfortable working on the car. Some bugs only happen at 30 mph, in the sun, with the panel warm.
• Based in Miami. This role isn't remote, because the hardware isn't.

Almost nobody arrives having done all three of these surfaces. Tell us which one
you're strongest in and which you'd be picking up, and we'll take that
seriously.

Bonus points

• Animation of any kind. Rigging, easing, keyframes, timing, character work, whether that came from games, film, motion design, or toys. It's the difference between a face that's correct and a face that's alive.
• Real-time graphics or shader work.
• LED matrices, addressable pixel protocols, or stage and show lighting.
• Automotive infotainment, or embedded UI on a device.
• Audio engineering. Latency, buffering, echo cancellation, gain staging.
• Rust.
• Robotics or animatronics, especially anything with a face.
• Games, toys, or interactive installations.
• Speech, text to speech, or lipsync systems.

What success looks like

• People talk to him without being told they can.
• His mouth matches his voice closely enough that nobody remarks on it.
• Designers ship a new expression without needing an engineer.
• A face that comes up the same way on every boot, in every car.

Compensation and benefits

• $140,000 to $180,000, depending on experience.
• Equity in Chip.
• Eligible for our company healthcare plan.