Software Engineer — Robotics Platform (m/w/d)

On-site in Euskirchen (Cologne–Bonn area) · 4 of 5 days/week · Full-time

CeiliX builds ceiling-mounted mobile robots for warehouse and factory logistics — the first of their kind, with systems live at customer sites in the EU and US. The company is around 10 people, has over €800k in pre-orders for 2026, and just won an industry award. Two engineers have written most of the platform software so far, and one of them is rotating off to other topics, which is why Robin — who leads software here — is hiring a partner.

Your first focus is the localization system. The robot orients itself by reading QR-coded tags on the ceiling: an upward-facing camera decodes a global position from each tag, and that gets fused with motor odometry. The system is already running at customer sites and on the trade-show floor, and the immediate job is making it production-robust and ready for scale.

In practice that touches a few connected pieces:

• The C/C++ runtime on real-time Linux that drives the camera and outputs a position

• The tooling and database around tag production and serialisation

• The mapping layer that turns a customer install into a usable map

• Camera calibration

Once localization is solid — Robin estimates a few months — the rest of the platform opens up. Motion control, industrial protocols like Profinet, MQTT and ROS, fleet coordination across multiple robots, and the backend behind the customer-facing web UI are all on the table. Where you go next depends on what the product needs and how you grow into the work. The longer-term picture is that you take over important pieces of the Skybot software as Robin moves topics off his plate.

You'll also be on the road from time to time, visiting customer deployments and trade fairs to debug on the live system and ship fixes on-site.

You report to Robin but he expects you to own your topics.

• 2+ years professional software engineering, with meaningful time on hardware-adjacent work (firmware, embedded, robotics, microcontrollers)

• Strong C/C++ (low-level, performance-sensitive) and Golang (backend, interfaces)

• Hands-on Linux — terminal-fluent, building/debugging on-device (ARM a plus)

• Comfort at the bits-and-bytes level — process boundaries, real-time vs. non-real-time, deterministic timing

• Electrical engineering basics — wire up and power a new sensor, read a datasheet, work with digital I/O (relays, discrete signals)

• Learning velocity — picks up a new domain fast (industrial protocols, control theory, a new toolchain) and unblocks yourself

• Self-directed — not blocked when ChatGPT doesn't know the answer

• Eligible to work in the EU

• On-site in Euskirchen 4 of 5 days/week

• Willing to travel within the EU (occasionally further) for deployments and trade fairs

• Fluent German — the team's main working language

• Microcontrollers or comparable low-level hardware/software work

• Industrial automation — PLC (structured text, IEC 61131-3), Profinet, MQTT, ROS. Learnable on the job.

• gRPC — bridge between the real-time runtime and the platform backend

• Release management or software project planning

• Computer vision / camera calibration

• JavaScript for occasional frontend (AI-assisted fine)

• Ownership from day one — localization end-to-end, then platform topics

• 2-3 year trajectory — own the important pieces of Skybot software as Robin offloads topics

• Hardware in the room — debug on the actual robot; see your code land in a real warehouse on customer visits

• Market is pulling — €800k+ pre-orders against €300k projected; inbound outpacing capacity

• Architecture is open — the next two years of platform decisions are on the table

Send what's relevant, we'll get back to you if there's a fit!