About Gradient Robotics
Gradient Robotics is building intelligent robots for data centers and factories. We believe the fastest practical path to capable general-purpose robotics is through industry deployment.
We own and build our full robotics stack — designing the hardware, building the software systems, training ML models, and manufacturing through a global supply chain — for world-class iteration speed, reliability, and scale.
We've built 3 generations of robots with a team of 7, backed by top-tier investors and working toward pilots with the world's largest data center builders. Our team created and built the best-selling open-source humanoid robots in the US at K-Scale Labs and worked on generations of foundation software for Tesla Optimus.
The RoleAs a founding software engineer at Gradient, you'll work close to the hardware — from kernel and firmware up to the autonomy stack. You'll own data pipelines that move hundreds of megabytes at single-digit millisecond latency. Your systems will bring visibility and determinism into real-time, end-to-end inference pipelines with one goal: the ML model is the only stochastic component.
What You'll DoShip performance-critical code to real robots daily
Understand the full data flow from AI models all the way to actuators
Push down latency and tighten the stack to make the system faster, more deterministic, and more reliable
Software: Rust, Python, C++, operating systems, multithreading
Infrastructure: Bazel, Nix, HIL testing, CI/CD
Firmware / Platform: Linux kernel hacking, embedded systems
Tracing / Profiling: ftrace, flamegraphs, eBPF
Linux I/O: DPDK, SPDK, io_uring
Shipped production systems close to hardware (drivers, kernels, embedded, robotics, or similar)
Debugged timing and concurrency issues in the wild
Owned messy, ambiguous problems and turned them into robust software
At Gradient, you’ll ship performance-critical code to real robots daily, understand the full data flow from AI models all the way to actuators, and watch the system get faster, more deterministic, and more reliable as you push down latency and tighten the stack. If that excites you, we should talk.
Skills Required
- Rust
- Python
- C++
- Operating systems
- Multithreading
- Bazel
- Nix
- HIL testing
- CI/CD
- Linux kernel hacking
- Embedded systems
- Tracing / Profiling (ftrace, flamegraphs, eBPF)
- Linux I/O (DPDK, SPDK, io_uring)
- Shipped production systems close to hardware (drivers, kernels, embedded, robotics)
- Debugged timing and concurrency issues
- Owned ambiguous problems and made robust software
What We Do
The datacenter buildout is the largest industrial project in human history. Gradient builds the autonomous robots that make it possible. Partnered with the world's largest AI infrastructure companies and backed by the industry's best investors, we move fast and build full-stack systems that matter.
