Staff Software Engineer

We are looking for an exceptional Staff Software Engineer to own the most visible surfaces in the company: the AI agent that programs industrial robots through plain conversation, and the vertical applications built around it. This role tackles one of the most ambiguous, high-leverage challenges in applied AI: turning a successful LLM-powered demo into a product customers rely on. Our verticals are the real jobs customers hire robots to do, like palletizing, welding, and machine tending. Each vertical is a product surface, with purpose-built features and user experiences, designed from the start for the agent to drive. Your impact will be measured not just by the code you write, but by your ability to make the agent's quality measurable, harden it to release, turn our verticals into products customers love, and raise the technical bar of a small, founding-stage team working directly with our founder, product leadership, and first customers. What You'll Do 🏗️ Strategic Architecture & Long-Term Vision Define the Future: Own the long-term product and technical vision for the AI agent and the vertical applications it powers, anticipating the scale, security, and product needs of LLM-powered robot programming a year or more out, including its core representation problem: how a language model safely reads, writes, and edits large structured automation programs. Design the Experi [... source excerpt omitted ...] what the agent can do grows with the platform, not against it. Standard Setter: Set the engineering standards for a nondeterministic product: latency and token budgets as product requirements, and evaluation gates as the bar every release must clear. 🏎️ Complex Project Leadership & Execution Product Ownership: Act as part-PM for your surface: work backwards from the product experience, spend real time with customers and operators, be opinionated on the roadmap, and own outcomes, not tickets. Build the Verticals: Ship vertical applications alongside the agent: purpose-built flows for palletizing, welding, and machine tending that encode how the work is really done, and that the ag [... source excerpt omitted ...] t can drive end-to-end. Drive the Program: Lead the agent's path from demo to release across our robot platform, QA, product, and AI teams: convert fast-moving asks into testable requirements and hold scope against a real ship date. Hands-on Delivery: Own production hardening end-to-end across the agent's TypeScript/Node stack: reliability, secure key management and usage controls, degraded/offline modes, and review- and QA-gated release engineering. 🛠️ Production Excellence & Organizational Leverage Systemic Quality: Build the agent's evaluation discipline (datasets mined from real usage, regression gates in CI, model-graded scoring) so that every early-customer failure, in any