---
title: 'Member of Technical Staff, Robotics at Sieve'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-robotics-sieve-san-francisco-rndazrv6c3xh'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-29'
---

# Member of Technical Staff, Robotics at Sieve

- **Company:** Sieve
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-23
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-29
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sieve/29dd4058-9868-46db-8e10-ace6c6f35c69

## Job description

## About Us

Sieve is a multi-modal lab curating the world's highest-quality training datasets — spanning video, audio, images, text, and 3D. We combine exabyte-scale data infrastructure and novel multimodal understanding techniques that push the frontier of foundation models. Video alone makes up 80% of internet traffic, and across modalities, data has become the enabling medium powering creativity, communication, gaming, AR/VR, and robotics. Sieve exists to solve the biggest bottleneck in the growth of these applications: high-quality training data.

We partner with top AI labs and did $XXM last quarter alone, as a team of ~30 people. We also raised our Series A from Tier 1 firms such as [Matrix Partners](https://matrix.vc/), [Swift Ventures](https://www.swift.vc/), [Y Combinator](https://www.ycombinator.com/), and [AI Grant](https://aigrant.com/).

## About the Role

As Sieve's first roboticist, you'll own the physical side of our physical AI data: the robots, capture rigs, and teleoperation stations that generate the datasets we deliver to frontier labs. You'll take each system from parts on a table to a setup that records clean, synchronized data at a partner site, and you'll handle both the hardware and the software along the way.

Most of your week will be spent with real equipment: wiring and rewiring, bringing up new sensors, chasing calibration drift, and fixing whatever stopped recording overnight. We want someone who has run systems in real deployments and brings discipline to the work. When a rig works once, you want to know why, and you want it to work the same way at every site. You don't consider a problem closed until the data coming off the system is right.

## What You’ll Do

- Capture rigs: Design and bring up the hardware we record with: multi-camera arrays, head- and wrist-mounted egocentric cameras, depth/IMU/force sensor packages, and teleoperation stations such as leader-follower arms.
- Calibration and time sync: Own camera intrinsics and extrinsics, hardware triggering, and clock alignment across cameras, IMUs, and encoders. If the streams don't line up, the dataset isn't usable.
- Root-cause failures: When a motor stalls, a camera drops frames, a power rail sags, or a bus goes quiet, find the actual cause and fix it so it stays fixed.
- Field deployments: Set up and operate systems at partner sites. Build them to survive daily use, to be run by operators without robotics backgrounds, and to be repaired quickly on site.
- Robot and capture software: Write and maintain drivers, ROS/ROS2 integration, recording and logging, and QA checks that run at capture time and hand data straight to Sieve's pipelines.
- Repeatable builds: Produce BOMs, assembly docs, validation plans, and SOPs so we can stand up the same setup at the next ten sites without you there.
- Team foundations: As the first hire in this area, set the hardware architecture, interfaces, test standards, and engineering culture for the physical AI team.

## Requirements

- 3+ years of experience building robotic, mechatronic, or controls systems (background in robotics, EE, ME, or similar)
- Systems you've deployed beyond the lab (in a factory, warehouse, field site, or customer site), plus stories about what failed and what you changed
- Hands-on bring-up and integration of robots, and comfortable troubleshooting anywhere from firmware to wiring to application code
- Comfortable at a workbench: soldering, building and repairing harnesses, tracking down power faults, and debugging CAN, serial, USB, and Ethernet links
- Production-quality Python and C++ for hardware that runs outside the lab (Rust welcome); fluent in Linux and ROS/ROS2
- Disciplined engineering habits: test plans before builds, documentation for what you ship, and measurements to back up claims
- Able to context switch at a moment's notice
- In-person at our SF HQ [+ travel to partner sites: % TBD]

Bonus

- Controls background: motor control, impedance/force control, trajectory generation, or state estimation
- Built teleoperation or data collection setups whose output was used to train robot policies
- Calibrating multi-camera systems, synchronizing heterogeneous sensors, or fusing their outputs
- CAD (SolidWorks, Onshape) and PCB design (KiCad, Altium)
- Experience as an early hire at a startup

## Benefits

- 401(k) and full health insurance
- Breakfast, lunch, and dinner covered, plus your choice of snacks
- Ubers covered home

*All roles at Sieve require you to be onsite in San Francisco 5 days per week

## About Sieve

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Sieve is an AI research lab and platform focused on building high-quality multimodal data (video, audio, image, and interaction data) and infrastructure for training frontier AI models.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed-stage)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Mokshith Voodarla (CEO) and Abhinav "Abhi" Ayalur (CTO)

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Artificial Intelligence / Data Infrastructure / Computer Vision
- Target customers: Frontier AI labs, Fortune 100 companies, and fast-growing AI startups working on generative media, robotics, computer use, world models, and agentic systems (primarily B2B Enterprise).
- Mission statement: To build the data and environments that frontier AI labs use to train the next generation of multimodal systems.

## Products & Services
- **Sieve Platform (sievedata.com)**: A development platform to discover, design, and run AI features at scale. It offers pre-built, production-ready apps and models (e.g., `sieve/speech_transcriber` for transcription, `sieve/seamless_text2text` for translation) that can be used via a single API call. The platform provides no-code interfaces, reliable infrastructure, and primitives like queues and async jobs. It is focused on making it easy to combine multiple AI models into complex applications (e.g., video dubbing, translation). [docs.sievedata.com]
- **Sieve Data Lab (sieve.ai)**: A multimodal data lab offering high-quality video, audio, image, and interaction datasets for frontier AI. Services include custom data collection, indexing billions of data points, filtering for semantics and rights, adding dense annotations (transcripts, object labels, UI events), and secure delivery with end-to-end encryption and SOC 2 Type 2 compliance. [sieve.ai]
- **Video AI API (Beta)**: A recently launched API that allows developers to use Sieve's pre-built AI apps and models for video processing in a single call. [sievedata.com]

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Raised approximately **$4M** in a seed round in 2022. [ycombinator.com, sievedata.com]
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (Winter 2022 batch, with Diana Hu as Primary Partner), AI Grant (Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross). [ycombinator.com, sieve.ai/about]
- **Growth Signals**: The company has evolved from a general AI platform to a specialized research lab focusing on the critical bottleneck of training data for multimodal AI. It has attracted the trust of "frontier AI labs, Fortune 100 companies, and fast-growing AI startups." The team size is listed as 18 on Y Combinator (2022) and they are actively hiring for multiple engineering roles through the end of 2026, indicating scaling. [ycombinator.com, jobs.ashbyhq.com]

## Competitive Advantages
- **Focus on Data as a Moat**: Sieve is explicitly structured as a "research lab exclusively focused on video data," identifying that high-quality training data is the primary bottleneck for the next generation of AI (video, audio, robotics, agentic systems). [ycombinator.com]
- **End-to-End Data Service**: They provide a complete pipeline from custom collection and indexing to dense annotation and secure delivery, unlike many competitors who only offer one piece.
- **Deep Research Partnerships**: The team works directly with leading AI researchers to understand model bottlenecks and design high-signal datasets, creating a tight feedback loop between research needs and data production.
- **Strong Founder-Market Fit**: Founders Mokshith Voodarla (Scale AI, NVIDIA) and Abhinav Ayalur (NVIDIA, Niantic) have direct experience in building computer-vision systems and experiencing the data difficulties first-hand.

## Strategic Focus
- **Deliver Training Data for Frontier AI**: Sieve’s current priority is to scale its exabyte-scale infrastructure and novel multimodal understanding techniques to create datasets for video, audio, images, software, robotics, and interactive worlds. [sieve.ai/about]
- **Enable Complex AI Use Cases**: The platform side focuses on making it easy for developers to combine multiple models to build production-ready AI features (like translation, dubbing) quickly.
- **Data Security and Compliance**: Emphasizing secure, compliant data delivery with SOC 2 controls is a key priority for servicing Fortune 100 companies.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: The company describes itself as "tight-knit, fast-moving, and deeply customer-oriented." It is a "research lab to the core," combining frontier research with infrastructure and customer partnership. [sieve.ai/about]
- **Team**: The team brings together experience from NVIDIA, Scale AI, Zoox, and Niantic, providing exposure to top-tier expertise in AI and infrastructure. [sieve.ai/about]
- **Impact**: Employees will be working on the critical layer of data for the next generation of AI models (generative media, robotics, agents), offering a rare position at the forefront of AI research. [ycombinator.com]
- **Remote/Hybrid/Office**: The company is based in San Francisco, CA.
- **Open Roles**: As of mid-2026, they are actively hiring for **Applied Research Engineer**, **Distributed Systems Engineer**, **Product Engineer**, and **Software Engineer**, with salary ranges listed as $150K - $300K depending on role and experience. [jobs.ashbyhq.com, ycombinator.com]

## Sources
1. [docs.sievedata.com](https://docs.sievedata.com/guide/intro)
2. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sieve)
3. [sieve.ai](https://www.sieve.ai/)
4. [sieve.ai/about](https://www.sieve.ai/about)
5. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/sieve)

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