Senior Middleware & Communications Engineer

The Opportunity

This one doesn't come around often.

A stealth-stage humanoid robotics company, backed by serious capital and built by a founding team that has done this before, is hiring a Senior Middleware & Communications Engineer as one of its earliest technical hires. The company has a working prototype in the real world. This is not a research lab. This is not a concept. The robot exists, and it needs to be made reliable at scale. You will work directly with the founders to build the communication foundation the entire humanoid platform depends on, ensuring data moves reliably and deterministically between sensors, compute, actuators, and AI models across the full stack. The decisions you make now will define the architecture for years.

What You'll Own

• The ROS 2 middleware layer, including DDS configuration, node topology, and QoS tuning for a safety-critical, real-time system
• End-to-end communication optimisation between all subsystems, including cross-computer links and AI model interfaces, to minimise latency and eliminate pipeline bottlenecks
• Profiling and observability tooling that gives the team full visibility into timing, jitter, and system health on deployed hardware
• Middleware contracts across teams, translating subsystem communication requirements into robust, well-specified interfaces

What You Bring

• 5+ years in robotics software, embedded systems, or distributed real-time systems
• Proven ROS 2 experience in production or near-production environments
• Expert-level C++ and Python, with deep familiarity with DDS, real-time Linux, and system profiling tools (perf, LTTng, ros2_tracing)
• Hands-on experience with NVIDIA Jetson or similar edge GPU platforms, including GPU-CPU memory management and data path optimisation to and from inference hardware
• The mindset that latency spikes are failure modes, not outliers

Why This Matters

Early-stage humanoid robotics roles at companies with real hardware, real funding, and real founding pedigree are exceptionally rare. This is a chance to be in the room where the foundational architecture gets built, with the equity, autonomy, and impact that comes with it.