Founding Engineer, Robotics / Software

HABIT deploys on-demand robotic labor to you — and to restaurants, hotels, stores, and farms in your neighborhood.

We're backed by Y Combinator (X25) and work in person at our office in El Segundo, just south of the Los Angeles Airport close to the beach.

We're looking for a Founding Robotics / Software Engineer to join us as we deliver robotic services to millions of Americans.

Responsibilities

You'll work directly with our co-founders to design and build robotic systems that scale across thousands of neighborhoods. As a generalist, you'll:

Own key components of our perception, navigation, and interaction stack

Design real-time autonomy pipelines in ROS 2 for dynamic, semi-structured environments

Integrate sensors, compute, and mobility hardware into a field-ready robotic system

Design and iterate on production-grade robotic hardware, from prototype to deployment

Build behavior trees and control policies to manage user interaction, navigation, and task completion

Required Qualifications

1.5+ years of work experience as a software engineer, robotics engineer, or similar

Bachelor's degree

2+ years of experience working with ROS 2 in real-world robotic applications

Experience designing, prototyping, and sourcing mechanical components for robotic system

Proficiency with CAD software and mechanical design workflows

Experience deploying navigation, localization, and SLAM solutions in indoor settings

Strong Python skills; familiarity with robotics libraries like rclpy, nav2, tf2, and OpenCV

Intermediate C++ knowledge (able to modify and extend ROS nodes and open-source libraries)

Comfortable working across the full stack, from hardware integration to field deployment

Desired Qualifications

Experience integrating and tuning robot perception pipelines using multimodal sensors and computer vision

Familiarity with mobile base platforms

Experience with behavior trees (e.g. BT.CPP) or customer-facing robot deployments

Strong interest in real-world human-robot interaction or service robotics

Additional Requirements

This position is 100% on-site in El Segundo, CA — no remote option available

Unfortunately, we are unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time

Must have a valid U.S. Driver's License

Willingness to work extended hours or weekends as needed to hit milestones