Mind Robotics

Application Engineer at Mind Robotics (Palo Alto, CA)

Mind Robotics· Palo Alto, CA·

Role details

Work type
Onsite
Employment
Full-Time

Job description

About Mind: Mind Robotics is building Physical AI for real-world industrial deployment, starting with the factory floor. We believe the hardest problems in AI are solved when researchers and engineers are hands-on with the physical world every day - and we're looking for people who are passionate about robotics, value ownership, and are excited to tackle difficult problems. Join us if you want to move beyond digital intelligence and put intelligence into motion.

About the team and the role: As an Application Engineer, you’ll be one of the founding engineers on the team that owns this application layer, reporting to our Head of Application Engineering. The systems work today; your job is to help harden and productionize them for scale — from 10 capture stations at one site to hundreds across multiple OEM plants, and from a handful of tele-operation stations to a multi-shift fleet. This is early, hands-on, 0-to-1 engineering: you’ll ship code that runs on real hardware in real factories, and see its effect on robot behavior.

Responsibilities:

  • Build the field capture stack — edge software for our data collection rigs: device management, sensor orchestration, and real-time data quality monitoring that holds up on a factory floor.
  • Ship the tele-operations stack — collection, evaluation, and operator tooling for our teleoperation stations, including metrics, task management, and the workflows our robot operators use every day.
  • Streamline annotation methods/models to increase labelling efficiency.
  • Make deployment repeatable — contribute to tooling and configuration systems that make onboarding a new manufacturing site a config change, not a custom engineering project.
  • Support the field — debug issues on live systems, instrument for observability, and work directly with site operations staff and robot operators who depend on your software.

Requirements:

  • 3+ years of software engineering experience building production systems.
  • Strong programming fundamentals and comfort working across the stack — edge devices, services, and data pipelines.
  • Experience with at least one of: real-time data pipelines, edge computing, device or fleet management, robotics or sensor systems.
  • Bias for ownership: you’ve taken features or systems from prototype to production and supported them in the field.
  • Clear communication and close collaboration with product, research, and operations partners.
  • Hands-on experience with sensor data (video, depth, IMU, force/torque) and the infrastructure to process it at scale is a plus.
  • Background in robotics, autonomous vehicles, industrial IoT, or teleoperation systems is a plus.
  • Exposure to manufacturing or other industrial environments is a plus.
  • Familiarity with ML data workflows (datasets, labelling, evaluation) is a plus.

Why work at Mind Robotics

  • Massive impact per person: The company explicitly states it is "building a lean, collaborative team where every individual has a massive impact" — a rare promise for a company with over half a billion in funding.
  • Hardware-in-the-loop culture: Engineers and researchers work directly with physical hardware daily, solving real-world problems rather than just simulation.
  • Top-tier team: Colleagues include alumni from Tesla, Rivian, Databricks, and Physical Intelligence, creating a high-caliber peer group.
  • Work policy: Hybrid workspace (combination of remote and on-site work) with a strong in-office presence in Palo Alto, CA. Most roles appear to be on-site or hybrid.
  • Open roles: 22 active positions across hardware engineering (actuation, motor design, electrical design, tactile sensing), software engineering (robotics, firmware, controls, ML infrastructure), and data platform roles.
  • Culture highlights: The company looks for "builders who are passionate about robotics and live for the challenge of making systems work in messy, complex environments." They emphasize a lean, collaborative team where every individual has massive impact.

Application questions