Founding Software Engineer - Autonomy Systems
Software Engineering · Full-time
Palo Alto, CA, USA
Sancho Robotics builds general-purpose mobile manipulators for advanced manufacturing. Our work was featured in the opening of the NVIDIA GTC 2026 keynote. Backed by $7 million in funding, our team has won multiple best-paper awards at top robotics conferences such as RSS and IROS and brings a decade of real-world robotics deployment experience.
As a core founding member, you will define and build the autonomy stack that allows our robots to understand and operate in dynamic 3D environments. Your initial focus will be perception: turning modern perception models and robot data into reliable capabilities on physical robots.
What you will do
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Implement autonomy modules: Implement reliable, production-quality components that give our robots a coherent understanding of their 3D environment.
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Debug cross-module failures: Use diagnostic tools like visualization, logs, and real robot data to diagnose failures of a complex robotics system.
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Manage system tradeoffs: Make practical engineering decisions across accuracy, latency, compute, robustness, and real-time robot behavior.
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Test on real robots: Use hardware experiments and field data to evaluate performance, identify failure modes, and improve the autonomy reliability.
What we are looking for
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Strong C++ and Python skills: you write robust and production-quality robotics software.
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You have deployed and tested on physical robots and sensors in the real world, not just simulation.
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Solid robotics fundamentals with hands-on experience in perception, planning, or manipulation.
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You understand how autonomy modules interact in a real robot system and can reason about tradeoffs across accuracy, latency, robustness, and compute.
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Familiar with ROS2 or similar middleware.
Bonus points
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Deep understanding of modern foundation perception models: DINO, DETR, Segment Anything, VLMs, or related architectures.
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Experience building low-latency inference systems with CUDA or Triton on edge devices such as NVIDIA Orin.