Hiring (NYC, SF): startup seeking brilliant senior Nix engineers

Jobs
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Who We Are

The physical world is highly fragmented, cut off from the upside of intelligence. We build systems capable of interfacing with anything - generating last mile hardware and software to merge preexisting, brownfield infrastructure into large scale robotic embodiments powered by our ambient intelligence layer. Our embedded engineering teams partner deeply with operators, driving step-changes in quality, throughput, R&D, and more.

We are growing rapidly, with founding engineers from SpaceX, Tesla, Google, Palantir, Gecko Robotics, Zipline, Boom Supersonic, and other world-class engineering teams. We are based in New York City and backed by leading American industrial investors.

Why We Use Nix

Central to our proposition: architecting the right abstractions and modular system components.

The world of edge compute comes with unique challenges: reliability, observability, controllability, etc. These challenges compound if mis-modeled or mishandled, doubly so with the velocity and heterogeneity of industrial deployments we target. Remotely reasoning over stateful nonsense, imperatively-managed hosts, or otherwise having facts about a fleet that aren’t derivable from a git SHA, are all nonstarters.

Nix alone provides us with the declarative, immutable base atop which we can author system components, reason about them in isolation, and reuse them in novel deployment environments.

Who You Are

  • Strong, senior software engineer fluent in Nix

    • Bonus: Rust, Go, Python, TypeScript

  • Deep Nix, NixOS, Linux, and systemd knowledge

    • Bonus: experience with non-”NixOS” Nix-built OSes

    • Bonus: CUDA, L4T

  • Embedded and/or edge experience

    • Bonus: industrial environments, factory floors

    • Bonus: passionate about the commercial industrial base!

  • Interested in inventing novel ways of composing Linux systems + our core developer platform: the abstractions, plumbing, and deployment layer!

Position

$175-275k, competitive equity

NYC- or SF-based preferred, remote okay. Cannot offer sponsorships at this time; US-only.

If you’re interested and feel you may be a fit, please message me with your resume and a few words about yourself!

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Are you open to working with contractors from outside the US?

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We build systems capable of interfacing with anything - generating last mile hardware and software to merge preexisting, brownfield infrastructure into large scale robotic embodiments powered by our ambient intelligence layer. Our embedded engineering teams partner deeply with operators, driving step-changes in quality, throughput, R&D, and more.

But, like, what is it you actually do? Like, if I looked at a site or a street and pointed at something and said “this gizmo runs your stuff”, what would that gizmo be and what would it be doing?

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Pardon the jargon, had leaned on one of our cofounders to bootstrap that section; realize it reads a bit pitch-y / is targeted to a different audience.

At risk of swinging too far the opposite direction, in my own words:

  • factories / the industrial base is comprised of lots of legacy BS and hard-to-automate (heterogeneous / unique / of insufficient scale) tasks
  • traditional automation has only benefited larger players in the space, with high-volume low-variance tasks
  • we are building:
    • edge compute
    • the platform / stack atop (what this opening is for)
    • modular (+ quickly-iterated) robotics, catered to specific tasks
  • getting that platform right changes the math on what is/isn’t easy to automate
  • in actual deployments, this looks like: novel/bespoke vision pipelines QCing things tricky for classical vision, connecting to and coordinating CNCs / thermoformers / VFDs / pick-and-place arms, etc

In other words, it’s a bet against the “foundation model” / generalist robot vision, instead focusing on making a flexible and robust platform that can hook into the existing world, and make it easy for forward-deployed engineers to compose a customer-specific system.

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Concrete-er yet:

  • Gizmo(s): linux boxes, smaller MCUs/FPGAs, robot arms, cameras, misc other sensors
  • Gizmos’ tasks: connect X-not-yet-connected-industrial-thing, sense/control/schedule/coordinate with it, make factory fast & happy

Read: fancy industrial Home Assistant, FDEs with a growing bag of reusable bits finding fun ways to compose those bits for each customer

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Unfortunately not presently, but that may change!

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I think it was a great pitch - admitting to collaborating with those companies companies, not even hiding it in the rest of the woud soup - I think most people can quickly judge if they see themselves working for a company like this.

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is there a website? That might help :slight_smile:

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Would add if I could! Stealth at present; the above is the most I can widely share pre-announcement.

For interested applicants, will of course schedule a call and discuss in more detail.