Robotics Software Engineer

The role

You will engineer low-latency, high-throughput systems that underpin the physical intelligence model. You will optimize layers from OS to camera pipelines and networking to make ML models run in production.

What you will do

• Engineer low-latency, high-reliability sensor and actuator pipelines across Linux, drivers, and middleware.
• Profile and optimize across compute, I/O, memory, scheduling, networking, and storage.
• Extend or modify Linux components, drivers, and scheduling.
• Develop and optimize real-time video streaming systems.
• Build tooling for profiling, tracing, and debugging timing issues.
• Work with researchers, hardware engineers, and operations teams to integrate optimized pipelines.

Required qualifications

• Strong programming skills in C++, Rust, or Python.
• Experience building and optimizing production software.
• Experience with Linux systems programming (syscalls, drivers, kernel parameters, scheduling, memory/IO subsystems).
• Background in real-time or near–real-time systems, VR/AR, video pipelines, 3D engines, or streaming systems.
• Ability to optimize across the entire stack - kernel scheduling, drivers, networking, GPU/CPU workloads, video frameworks, and distributed components.
• Experience with profiling tools (perf, tracing, eBPF, GPU profilers, network analyzers).
• Comfort diving into complex performance issues.
• A mindset oriented around determinism, throughput, frame budgets, jitter minimization, and real-time correctness.
• Ability to collaborate deeply with researchers and platform engineers.

Nice to have

• Experience with VR/AR platforms or low-latency 3D engines.
• Camera system expertise (synchronization, capture pipelines, codecs, GPU offload).
• Streaming/video conferencing stack experience (WebRTC, real-time transport optimizations).
• Background in robotics, autonomous systems, SLAM pipelines, or perception systems (implementation, not research).
• Expertise in kernel-level engineering, device drivers, or high-performance networking.
• Familiarity with distributed systems that process real-time data flows.

Before you apply

• Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

About the company

Physical Intelligence is bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world. The company is developing foundation models and learning algorithms to power robots and physically-actuated devices.