Jobs at Watney Robotics Inc

Design and develop mechanical components and assemblies for autonomous production robots, including grippers, manipulators, end-effectors, and mounts. Lead designs from concept through production, develop rapid prototypes, integrate components into larger hardware systems, and ensure performance, reliability, and manufacturability. Provide technical leadership and collaborate with hardware engineering and operations teams in an onsite, fast-paced environment.

Run and evaluate machine learning training experiments for autonomous robots, curate and clean real-world fleet data, improve data-labeling structures, track model performance metrics, and collaborate with Teleoperations to improve data collection. The role focuses on production ML for perception, decision-making, and control, including imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and deployment evaluation on live robotic systems.

Own end-to-end machine learning model quality for autonomous robots, including dataset curation, training, evaluation, and production deployment. Work with multimodal sensor data from cameras, IMUs, LiDAR, and odometry to develop perception, planning, navigation, and manipulation models. Build low-latency, continuous inference systems and collaborate with teleoperations and fleet operations teams. Experience with large-scale multimodal models, distributed GPU training, production ML code, and cluster management is valuable.

Research engineers determine which machine learning methods autonomous robots should learn next, design evaluations for real-world generalization, and deploy successful models to a live robotic fleet. The role focuses on imitation learning, reinforcement learning, production ML code, benchmark validation, and collaboration with training and serving infrastructure teams.

Runs the robot pilot program by coordinating tryouts and training, tracking pilot performance and operational KPIs, following and improving SOPs, coordinating robot allocation with Fleet Operations, and escalating findings to program and engineering leaders. The role supports a large live deployment floor and requires strong communication, critical thinking, data analysis, and adaptability in a fast-changing operations environment.

Owns end-of-line manufacturing test procedures from production through shipping. The role validates robotic systems across multiple checkpoints, diagnoses defects spanning mechanical, electrical, and software domains, and transitions test capabilities from laboratory prototypes to reliable production systems. Responsibilities include designing test fixtures and procedures, investigating intermittent hardware failures to root cause, and ensuring manufacturing readiness against scheduled build dates.

Owns foundational business operations for a robotics company, including vendor management, site leasing, spending, contracts, logistics, and ambiguous cross-functional initiatives. The role supports engineers and technicians by taking operational work off their plate, establishing processes, and driving problems to resolution in a small, fast-moving environment.

Build Watney’s finance function from the ground up, including financial planning, budgeting, reporting, cash management, forecasting, and spend-approval processes. The Finance Manager will guide leadership decisions, model cash and capital needs through manufacturing or hardware scale-up, and support site leases, manufacturer builds, and vendor contract negotiations.

Own end-to-end physical operations for Watney’s autonomous robot fleet, including allocation, readiness, deployment, and customer-site launches. Establish sites through construction, security, network, and vendor coordination; manage production pilots to completion; build scheduling processes; and coordinate escalations among technicians, engineering, and site logistics. The role requires hands-on work with live hardware and construction environments, including shift-based or 24/7 operations.

Own 0-to-1 hardware programs that teach autonomous robots new tasks. Responsibilities include developing schedules and budgets, coordinating engineers and cross-functional teams, taking hardware from initial build through validation, and establishing processes where none exist. The role may expand to include robot build and manufacturing programs.

Source technical, go-to-market, operational, and leadership candidates across multiple searches. Develop sourcing strategies, engage passive candidates through outreach, referrals, and communities, and collaborate with founders and hiring managers on complex technical roles. Maintain organized, candidate-friendly recruiting processes and help establish operational recruiting excellence as the talent function scales.

The Recruiter will manage the candidate experience from outreach to offer, support sourcing efforts, coordinate interviews, and maintain accurate records in the ATS.

Deployment Strategists at Watney implement robotics for major enterprises by managing deployments, aligning customer needs with engineering solutions, and presenting strategies to executives.

Design and build off-robot full-stack systems including video annotation platforms, VR teleoperation interfaces, secure customer portals, and cloud infrastructure for ingesting and processing petabyte-scale telemetry in real time.

Design and develop bare-metal firmware and low-level drivers, lead board bring-up, build and automate HIL test rigs, optimize low-level communication stacks (I2C/SPI/CAN), and collaborate with CMs/OEMs for chip and board validation.

Design, own, and scale training and inference infrastructure for a robotic fleet. Build data pipelines, optimize distributed training and GPU utilization, speed experiment launch and reproducibility, and contribute to core training code.

Build and own end-to-end off-robot systems: develop video-heavy annotation and VR teleoperation platforms, architect cloud infrastructure and high-throughput telemetry pipelines, maintain live systems with integration testing and OpenTelemetry, and scale production deployments for autonomous robotics.

Build and maintain embedded software for autonomous robotic systems: hardware bring-up with CMs/OEMs, develop and maintain embedded Rust OS (pathOS), create automated HIL integration tests, and prototype/validate new sensors with ML and mechanical teams.

Build and scale the perception data engine and infrastructure: petabyte-scale multimodal ingestion pipelines, automated annotation and feature extraction, continuous evaluation and deterministic regression testing, and telemetry/observability to monitor model performance and data drift for autonomous robots.

Design, implement, and tune low-level and optimal controllers (PID, LQR, MPC) for real robots; build estimators, sensor-fusion, localization (SLAM/UKF) and path-planning; deploy and optimize real-time control code across a fleet; define fleet metrics and auto-tuning; collaborate with research, hardware, and deployment teams to diagnose and fix field failures.