Systems Software Engineer

The role

You will move data from AI models to actuators by working close to hardware from kernel and firmware up through controls and perception layers. You will contribute to real-time pipelines and bring visibility and determinism to the end-to-end inference pipeline.

What you will do

• Ship performance-critical code to real robots daily
• Learn the full data flow from camera frames to actuator feedback
• Contribute to the real-time control loop
• Build pieces of the perception data path
• Push down latency and tighten the stack
• Build tooling and instrumentation for pipeline visibility

Required qualifications

• 1+ years of software engineering experience building systems close to hardware
• Strong programming fundamentals in at least one of Rust, C++, or Python
• Solid understanding of operating systems and multithreading
• Experience building production systems, internal tools, student teams, or personal projects
• Debugged real timing, concurrency, or hardware issues
• Comfort with ambiguity and a strong learn-by-doing instinct
• Able to work on-site in San Francisco 5 days/week (6 days/week if needed during crunch time)

Nice to have

• Linux kernel or embedded systems experience
• Exposure to build and test infrastructure: Bazel, Nix, HIL testing, or CI/CD
• Experience with real-time control systems: motor control, high-rate control loops, or robot controllers
• Computer vision pipeline experience: camera drivers, image transport, GPU inference, or sensor synchronization
• Tracing and profiling experience: ftrace, flamegraphs, eBPF
• Comfort using AI tools to multiply your own output

About the company

Gradient builds the autonomous robots that make datacenter buildout possible. They are partnered with the world's largest AI infrastructure companies and backed by industry investors.