--- title: 'Senior Software Engineer - Tools at Watney' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-tools-watney-san-francisco-6qvk06g0vr02' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-17' --- # Senior Software Engineer - Tools at Watney - **Company:** Watney - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-10-17 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-17 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/watney/384da207-1b8a-4ec7-be98-590d064424b1 ## Job description ## Our Mission Expand human ambition in the physical world. Critical infrastructure is constrained by labor shortages, hazardous working conditions, and operational complexity. Watney builds and deploys autonomous robotic systems that increase the speed and capacity of buildout, starting with data centers. ## About the Role At Watney, a tools engineer builds the tools that turn what our robots record in the field into data our models learn from. Engineers use the same tools to match a change in a robot’s telemetry to the moment an error happened. What a robot should learn from a day of real work is still an open question: which moments are worth training on, and which labels hold up under review. Some of our best labels come from records captured on site while the robots work. Data quality is model quality here. You will own the tools that decide what goes into a training set, and what those tools reveal about the data shapes where our R&D goes next. ## What You’ll Do - Own the viewer engineers use to play back a robot’s data and line up telemetry with errors. - Own dataset curation: the dataset API and the tools engineers use to find and group episodes and build training sets. - Build annotation tooling with the rest of the software team, and weigh what we build against what we buy. - Build the quality review process for annotated data. - Work with the ML team who train on this data, the engineers who debug the fleet with it, and the annotators who label it. You May Be a Good Fit If You: - Have built an internal tool that became the way a team works. - Have built visualization or analysis tools for large volumes of sensor and video data. - Have built dataset tooling or a data pipeline that ML engineers train from. - Have designed a labeling or review workflow that people use to annotate data at volume. We’re committed to building a diverse, inclusive team. At Watney Robotics, we welcome people of all backgrounds and identities, and we make hiring decisions based on skills, experience, and potential. If you’re passionate about robotics but don’t meet every requirement, we still encourage you to apply! Curious to learn more? Follow us here on [X](https://x.com/watneyrobotics/) and [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/watneyrobotics/about/) ## About Watney ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Develops autonomous robotics systems to operate datacenter and supercomputing infrastructure, partnering with hyperscalers to accelerate compute scaling. - **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2024 - **Founders**: Ryan Gannon (Co-Founder), Sean Cheong (Co-Founder) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Robotics Engineering / Datacenter Infrastructure Automation - **Target customers**: Hyperscale cloud providers and large-scale data center operators (Enterprise B2B) - **Mission or purpose statement**: “Deploy an abundant, intelligent workforce” by enabling the growth of critical infrastructure through autonomous robots. ## Products & Services - **Autonomous Datacenter Robotics Platform**: A fleet of autonomous robots designed for datacenter buildout and breakfix operations. The system handles physical tasks such as server installation, cable management, maintenance, and repair, reducing human labor and accelerating deployment timelines. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available - **Key Metric** (Private): **$21.0M in total funding** (Seed round closed May 30, 2025) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Conviction, Abstract, A* (A-star). Partners with the world’s largest hyperscalers (names not disclosed). - **Growth Signals**: - Headcount grew **183.3% year-over-year** to 11 employees (as of mid-2026) - Monthly headcount growth of **+6.2%** - Active job postings rose **+28.6% month-over-month** and **+350% quarter-over-quarter** - Currently hiring for 9 roles spanning engineering, operations, and strategy ## Competitive Advantages - **Deep domain focus**: Solely dedicated to datacenter and supercomputing infrastructure – a narrow, high-stakes vertical with massive scaling demand. - **Elite founding team**: Includes former GSM for iPhone, former founding engineer at Worldcoin, and a builder of the world’s fastest EV racecar (ETH Zurich). - **Early partnerships with hyperscalers**: Already working with the largest cloud providers, providing critical validation and a clear path to production. - **Full-stack ownership**: Company is moving from prototype to production fleets, offering engineers end-to-end impact from hardware to software. ## Strategic Focus - **Scale from prototype to production fleets**: Transitioning from small-scale deployments to large autonomous fleets. - **Deepen hyperscaler partnerships**: Expand contracts and joint development roadmaps with major cloud providers. - **Grow engineering and operations teams**: Aggressively hiring across robotics, software, facilities management, and deployment strategy to support production scaling. ## Why Work Here - **In-Office culture**: All roles are based in San Francisco (HQ); the company emphasizes in-person collaboration. - **Ground-floor opportunity**: With outsized ownership and visibility, employees shape the “rollout playbook” for a category-defining robotics company. - **Technical challenge**: Work on real systems that combine robotics, AI, hardware, and infrastructure at scale. - **Notable peers**: Colleagues include alumni from Scale AI, Amazon Web Services, Tools for Humanity, Warburg Pincus, and the US Army Corps of Engineers. - **Growth trajectory**: A very young company (founded 2024) with rapid hiring and clear product-market fit, ideal for early-stage career builders. ## Sources 1. [watneyrobotics.com](https://watneyrobotics.com/) 2. [linkedin.com/company/watneyrobotics](https://www.linkedin.com/company/watneyrobotics) 3. [builtin.com/company/watney-robotics-inc](https://builtin.com/company/watney-robotics-inc) 4. [startups.gallery/companies/watney](https://startups.gallery/companies/watney) ## Other roles at Watney - [Staff Firmware Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-firmware-engineer-watney-san-francisco-77pan28rddj1) — San Francisco, CA - [Staff Software Engineer - Infrastructure](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-infrastructure-watney-san-francisco-2r2gk3w7qvkb) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Manufacturing Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-manufacturing-engineer-watney-san-francisco-e11y199wtagm) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Mechanical Engineer - Robotics](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-mechanical-engineer-robotics-watney-san-francisco-tazxw9ea9ds5) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Research Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-research-engineer-watney-san-francisco-kfgw3dy7m4eb) — San Francisco, CA - [Machine Learning Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-engineer-watney-san-francisco-k9y1d6h7xdnv) — San Francisco, CA - [Staff Machine Learning Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-machine-learning-engineer-watney-san-francisco-t8stgn4p7ad8) — San Francisco, CA - [Program Manager, Teleoperations](https://feeny.ai/job/program-manager-teleoperations-watney-san-francisco-c0zedeb0sc5r) — San Francisco, CA - [Staff Program Manager, Teleoperations](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-program-manager-teleoperations-watney-san-francisco-w7qah1bzn6xd) — San Francisco, CA - [Operations Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/operations-lead-watney-san-francisco-be77taz7js4n) — San Francisco, CA