mundane · 1 month ago
principal software engineer, embodied systems
Palo Alto, CA
Full-time
Onsite
Lead/Staff
$300K/yr - $500K/yr
8+ years expMundane is a venture-backed seed-stage robot learning startup founded by a team of Stanford researchers and builders. As a Principal Software Engineer on the Embodied Systems team, you’ll architect and build the core software that powers humanoid robots, collaborating with various engineering teams to ensure high-reliability systems under real-world constraints.
Information Technology & Services
Responsibilities
Architect, develop, and own core components of the humanoid control, teleoperation, safety, and middleware stack
Design high-performance distributed systems for robot-to-cloud communication, telemetry, and remote operation
Lead system-wide architectural decisions across ROS2 nodes, message interfaces, networking, and real-time pipelines
Build reliable software integrations across hardware, firmware, sensors, actuators, and cloud infrastructure
Develop tools for debugging, monitoring, logging, and replay that accelerate iteration for the entire engineering team
Collaborate with ML, controls, and perception teams to integrate new models and ensure stable deployment
Drive code quality, testing rigor, safety enforcement, and production-readiness across all robot systems
Mentor and technically guide engineers across the stack — raising the bar on design, reliability, and execution
Contribute to robot bring-up, field testing, and fleet-level diagnostics to validate system performance at scale
Establish best practices for system reliability, fault tolerance, crash recovery, and latency reduction
Qualification
Required
8+ years of experience as a software engineer working on robotics, real-time systems, or distributed systems
Expert proficiency in C++ and Python, with a track record of owning production systems end-to-end
Deep familiarity with ROS2, middleware architectures, message passing, and distributed control
Strong understanding of hardware/software integration, real-time communication, network architecture, and telemetry
Experience building fault-tolerant, low-latency, system-critical software for autonomous systems or robots
Ability to lead architectural direction and guide multi-disciplinary engineering teams
Exceptional debugging skills — across logs, bag files, hardware interfaces, and real-world robot behavior
Preferred
Experience with VR teleoperation, WebRTC/SRT, or low-latency streaming pipelines
Background in controls, motion planning, state estimation, or sensor fusion
Familiarity with ML inference tooling or robot learning frameworks
Experience running robots in production environments or supporting large-scale deployments
Benefits
Competitive salary + equity
Flexible PTO
Legendary merch
Coffee
Robots
Sauna & cold plunge (pending)
Company
mundane
founded by Stanford robotics researchers, we're building humanoids that are useful beyond just lab demos, but in actual real-world deployments.
11-50 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageCompany data provided by crunchbase