Robotics AI Engineer, Tactile Perception & Representation

We’re a stealth robotics startup in Palo Alto hiring an engineer to define and ship a canonical Tactile Tensor and the reference SDK + conformance suite that makes tactile data reproducible, interoperable, and directly usable for robotics perception and foundation-model training.

Critical requirement : deterministic, byte-stable serialization + strict versioning, plus tokenization-ready interfaces (tensors → stable token streams) for Transformer-style robotics pipelines—without heavy dependencies.

What you’ll do

• Define the Tactile Tensor : units, coordinate frames, timestamps, shapes, uncertainty, required metadata, and forward / backward compatibility rules.
• Build a lightweight reference SDK (Python and / or C++) that validates, serializes / deserializes, and produces identical outputs across platforms.
• Specify training-grade data contracts : deterministic windowing / patching, normalization / quantization, and token schemas that are stable across sensors and logging setups.
• Ship a public-facing spec + examples + CI conformance tests so external robotics labs / OEMs can implement against it with confidence.
• Architect the tensor representation to ensure physical invariances (e.g., coordinate-frame independence, scale-invariant contact patches) so that policies trained on one robot's geometry generalize to another.

Requirements

Preferred

Key Deliverables

Contract-to-hire with a clear path to full-time and founding equity for the right fit.