Lead Software Engineer

About the Role

We are hiring a Lead Software Engineer to take ownership of significant portions of our stack — from the embedded systems running on the Kiwi robot, to the cloud services and data infrastructure behind them, to the customer- and operator-facing applications built on top. This is a senior individual contributor role with a clear leadership component: you will help lead the engineering team, set technical direction within your areas, and establish the practices that let us scale.

You will operate as an owner. That means scoping problems end-to-end, making consequential technical decisions, and being accountable for the systems you ship — from design through production, observability, and iteration. You should be comfortable holding multiple projects in context, moving quickly where speed matters, and slowing down where reliability and maintainability matter more — particularly given that our software runs on real hardware deployed in the field with real customers.

What You’ll Do

• Lead the development and operation of software running across the Kiwi robot, vehicles, sensors, and battery management systems as the robot navigates parking lots and delivers charging sessions.
• Design, build, and operate the backend services and APIs that support real-time management of our hardware fleet, including the telemetry pipeline that streams robot state, session events, and sensor health to our central systems.
• Own our data warehousing and management systems, particularly for the large unstructured datasets generated by our robots, and contribute to early ML engineering work built on top of that data.
• Drive improvements to the customer and operator experience — building strong UIs, integrating user feedback, running experiments, and rethinking how our team views and reacts to real-time field information across admin, teleoperator, property manager, and end-customer views.
• Establish and maintain the engineering infrastructure that lets us ship reliably: CI/CD pipelines, deployment processes, observability, and internal tooling — especially important as we move toward pilot deployments.
• Help lead the engineering team day-to-day — owning project planning and execution, communicating timelines and tradeoffs to stakeholders across the company, and unblocking the people around you.
• Make and defend technical decisions that align business objectives with the realities of our hardware, infrastructure, and timeline constraints.

Who You Are

• 2–4 years of experience deploying and operating production software, ideally including work in a robotics or hardware-adjacent setting.
• You have led non-trivial projects end-to-end and are comfortable owning systems in production — including the parts that aren’t fun (on-call, debugging, postmortems).
• You can lead a small team and manage projects across multiple workstreams, communicating clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• You’re comfortable working at the intersection of software and hardware, where bugs aren’t always in the code and the feedback loop involves a physical robot in a parking lot.

Technical Skills

• Backend and cloud: Node.js, Python, FastAPI, Postgres, and AWS services (EC2, Lambda, S3).
• Frontend: React, Next.js, and modern TypeScript-based web development.
• Embedded and robotics: C++, ROS2, and real-time communication protocols. Strong ROS2 experience is important for this role.
• Data: Building and operating production data pipelines, working with large unstructured datasets, data warehousing, and exposure to ML engineering workflows.
• Infrastructure and tooling: Docker, Git and GitHub Actions, CI/CD pipelines, and comfort working in Linux environments with bash scripting (including more complex scripts for robotic systems).

Bonus Points For

• Prior experience shipping software in a robotics company or hardware startup, especially in environments with real-world deployment constraints (weather, power, intermittent connectivity).
• Background in EV charging, OCPP, or other hardware-adjacent communication protocols.
• Experience working with telemetry, observability, or fleet management at scale.
• Cybersecurity experience, particularly around device security, network protocols, or IoT threat modeling.
• Experience leading small engineering teams or managing cross-functional projects.
• A portfolio, GitHub, or shipped product demonstrating range and depth.