Senior Principal Technical Solution Architect

Senior Principal Technical Solution Architect – Humanoid Robotics 

Location: California Bay Area

Physical AI is transforming how humans interact with intelligent machines. At Cerence, we are extending our leadership in Voice AI and Conversational Intelligence into Humanoid Robotics, building software platforms that enable robots to understand, reason, communicate, and act in the real world. 

Role Overview 

The Senior Principal Technical Solution Architect owns the end-to-end software architecture for our humanoid robot applications. You will bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI, robotic operating systems, and physical hardware. In this role, you will guide critical technical decisions, manage physical system constraints, and supervise an agile, high-performing startup development team. 

Your Impact 

• Own the end-to-end application architecture for humanoid robots. 

• Define reusable software platforms spanning robotics, AI, voice, cloud, and edge systems. 

• Lead technical decisions involving robotics frameworks, operating systems, SDKs, AI infrastructure, and deployment architectures. 

• Guide proof-of-concepts into production-ready customer deployments. 

• Collaborate with robotics OEMs, technology partners, and cross-functional engineering teams. 

Key Responsibilities 

System Architecture: Design scalable, modular software architectures for humanoid robot applications. 

Tech Stack Selection: Evaluate and select robotic software frameworks, developer SDKs, etc. 

Hardware-Software Co-design: Collaborate closely with mechanical and electrical teams to optimize system latency, compute allocation, thermal envelopes, battery utilization, and power budgets. 

Platform Reuse: Drive a platform strategy enabling modular reuse of application logic across different physical robot forms. 

AI & Agentic Systems: Define how foundation models, agentic orchestration frameworks, memory systems, multimodal AI, and reasoning engines integrate into robot applications. 

Production Readiness: Ensure deployed solutions meet reliability, observability, maintainability, security, and operational requirements. 

Team Supervision: Lead, mentor, and unblock a small, fast-moving startup team of developers. 

Required Skills & Experience 

Mandatory (Must Have) 

• Robotics Domains: Deep understanding of Navigation & Localization (SLAM, Nav2), Manipulation & Motion Planning (MoveIt2), Perception Pipelines, Sensor Fusion, Robot Middleware, DDS communication, and distributed robotics architectures. 

• Systems Engineering: Proven experience designing cyber-physical systems operating under compute limitations, thermal constraints, battery optimization, network intermittency, and fail-safe operational requirements. 

• Programming: Advanced C++ (17/20) and Python architectural design expertise. 

• Operating Systems: Strong mastery of Linux (Ubuntu/Debian), containerized deployments, and embedded computing platforms. 

• Leadership: 3+ years managing engineering teams in startup, R&D, robotics, or fast-paced product development environments. 

• Experience: 8+ years in robotics, autonomous systems, industrial automation, physical AI, or complex cyber-physical environments. 

Good to Have (Highly Valued Plus)