Senior Staff Software Engineer, Robot Platform

Agility’s commercially deployed humanoids operate alongside teams in warehouses, manufacturing facilities, and distribution centers—tackling physically demanding and repetitive tasks while enabling workers to focus on higher-value work. With industry-leading safety standards and years of proven deployment data, we're pioneering a new era of automation that enhances human potential.

About the Role

Our software team is growing and we are looking for talented engineers to join our agile, world-class team. Our Robot Platform team is the foundational core of our product, dedicated to providing a robust, reliable, and secure software substrate that accelerates all robot feature development. We own the critical layers that all other software teams build upon: middleware, core services, configuration, and telemetry.

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer you will be the key architectural driver, operating at the intersection of long-term strategy and deep technical execution. You will define the component boundaries, communication patterns, and golden path for our robot software stack, while championing engineering excellence and mentoring high-performing engineers across the organization. This role is a rare opportunity to own and evolve mission-critical, cross-cutting systems, from high-performance robotics frameworks to the centralized belief state and behavior coordination engines, ensuring our physical robots operate reliably in dynamic, real-world environments.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Ownership & Execution:

• Define and Evolve Architecture: Own and drive the long-term technical direction for the robot software stack, including component boundaries, data contracts, inter-process communication protocols (RPC/streaming), and deployment workflows.
• Core Frameworks & Services: Take hands-on ownership of the critical, cross-cutting frameworks and core services that are fundamental dependencies for all robot features, such as:
• Behavior coordination and state machine frameworks.
• The robot’s belief state and world representation.
• Simulation and playback timing coordination mechanisms.
• Advanced logging, telemetry, and configuration management libraries.
• Performance & Reliability: Drive performance, determinism, and reliability improvements across the entire on-robot software stack, and evaluate and introduce major infrastructure upgrades.
• Internal Tooling: Lead the strategy and execution for internal developer tooling, including advanced debugging utilities and scripts for provisioning and testing within simulation and hardware environments.

Influence & Mentorship:

• Technical Advisor: Act as the primary technical advisor, mentoring Senior and Staff-level engineers on system design, developer experience, and best practices across the full software development lifecycle.
• Drive Adoption: Champion the adoption of internal tools and foundational frameworks by cultivating strong collaboration and iterating based on organizational feedback.

Collaboration & Alignment:

• Engineering Partnership: Partner directly with AI, Controls, and Perception teams to ensure frameworks meet their performance and capability needs, accelerating their feature delivery.
• Data Platform: Coordinate with the Data Platform team on advanced logging, serialization, and telemetry strategies.
• Release Alignment: Align with OS and Release teams on container, image, and deployment primitives, focusing on high-level integration points rather than low-level operating system ownership.

Required Qualifications

• 12+ years of professional experience in high-performance, real-time, or deeply embedded software engineering, with a significant track record in robotics or similar complex, integrated systems.
• Demonstrated expertise in defining and evolving large-scale software architectures, and a history of ownership over mission-critical, cross-cutting frameworks.
• Mastery of modern C++ and expert-level proficiency in systems programming on Linux.
• Expertise in designing, building, and operating low-latency and highly reliable distributed systems, particularly those with strict timing and determinism requirements.
• Proven experience mentoring and providing architectural guidance to Staff and Principal-level engineers.
• Exceptional ability to autonomously gather complex, cross-team requirements, communicate high-stakes technical trade-offs,