Physical Intelligence

Robotics Software Engineer

San Francisco

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 197 days ago

PythonRustC++Distributed SystemsAlgorithmsLinuxMachine LearningSystems EngineeringRoboticsControlsVoIPAR/VRResearchCollaboration

About the role

Achieving real-world performance requires extremely tight system latency, reliable sensor pipelines, and end-to-end engineering that makes perception and control loops work at real-time speeds.
As a Runtime Software Engineer, you'll engineer the low-latency, high-throughput systems that underpin our physical intelligence model.
You won't be designing ML models - you'll be the person who makes them run flawlessly in production, optimizing every layer from OS to camera pipeline to networking.

Own Real-Time Pipelines: Engineer low-latency, high-reliability sensor and actuator pipelines across Linux, drivers, and middleware.
Optimize System Performance: Profile and optimize across compute, I/O, memory, scheduling, networking, and storage to meet real-time constraints and increase throughput.
Build OS-Level Capabilities: Extend or modify Linux components, drivers, and scheduling to achieve deterministic behavior under load.
Streaming & Video Systems: Develop and optimize real-time video streaming systems where frame timing and packet scheduling matter.
Reliability & Debugging: Build tooling for profiling, tracing, and debugging timing issues across distributed systems and hardware interfaces.
Strong programming skills in C++, Rust, or Python, with experience building and optimizing production software.
Ability to optimize across the entire stack - kernel scheduling, drivers, networking, GPU/CPU workloads, video frameworks, and distributed components.
Ability to collaborate deeply with researchers and platform engineers to translate high-level model requirements into real-world system performance.
You'll collaborate closely with researchers, platform engineers, and robotics operators to identify bottlenecks and extract maximum performance from the entire system.

Experience with Linux systems programming (syscalls, drivers, kernel parameters, scheduling, memory/IO subsystems).
Experience with profiling tools (perf, tracing, eBPF, GPU profilers, network analyzers) and comfort diving into complex performance issues.
Experience with VR/AR platforms or low-latency 3D engines.

Bonus Points If You Have
We are a group of engineers, scientists, roboticists, and company builders developing foundation models and learning algorithms to power the robots of today and the physically-actuated devices of the future.

Physical Intelligence is bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world. We are a group of engineers, scientists, roboticists, and company builders developing foundation models and learning algorithms to power the robots of today and the physically-actuated devices of the future.
As a Runtime Software Engineer, you'll engineer the low-latency, high-throughput systems that underpin our physical intelligence model. You won't be designing ML models - you'll be the person who makes them run flawlessly in production, optimizing every layer from OS to camera pipeline to networking. You'll collaborate closely with researchers, platform engineers, and robotics operators to identify bottlenecks and extract maximum performance from the entire system.
The Team
Physical Intelligence is bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world.
The Runtime team is responsible for building the core platform that Pi's robots, sensors, and evaluation pipelines rely on.
The team spans Linux systems engineering, camera and sensor pipelines, robot actuator controllers, networking, real-time IO, and performance tooling.
They ensure our ML models and control systems operate under strict latency budgets and are robust under real-world conditions.

This listing is sourced directly from Physical Intelligence's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.