Senior Backend & Systems Engineer
About this role
Who we are
Cartken is a startup at the forefront of autonomous robotics and short-distance material transport. Our team has more than a century of combined experience solving some of the toughest challenges in autonomous vehicles, robotics, and operations at Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. We have robots operating around the world providing reliable and cost-effective short-distance material transport for our industrial customers.
The AI powering our robots makes them the safest and most reliable in the market today.Our robots are equipped with multiple sensors and cameras which allow them to stop on a dime in order to avoid collisions and choose routes which have the fewest hazards.
You can read more about Cartken here.
Our mission
We streamline short-distance material transport through cost-efficient and flexible autonomous robotics.Why join us
We’re passionate about applying state-of-the-art technology to solve real-world problems and become the brains behind an automation revolution
We’re fast and thrive on making an impact
You get to work with a diverse team of super talented people across USA and Germany
You’ll also get to build a growing startup and by default do and learn a tonne
What you'll do
- 5+ years of relevant work experience.
- Own the systems managing, configuring, updating and monitoring our robot fleet.
- Help design, implement and validate the next generation of our fleet update and job execution platform.
- Develop backend services and internal tools for operational workflows, job scheduling, configuration management, and fleet maintenance.
- Work on core backend topics such as APIs, service-to-service communication, data modeling, security, reliability, and observability.
- Work on infrastructure topics such as NATS, GCP, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and observability.
- Collaborate closely with robotics and operations teams to turn real-world field & customer requirements into robust technical solutions.
What you bring
- Strong backend, systems, or DevOps engineering experience.
- Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently on broad, sometimes ambiguous technical challenges.
- You enjoy ownership of large systems and push them forward independently
- Experience with distributed systems, Linux-based environments, networking, containers, or infrastructure automation.
- A pragmatic engineering mindset: you care about robustness, reliability, maintainability, and getting useful systems into production.
- Experience in the IoT/Robotics space is a plus
- Bonus: experience with robotics, fleet management, NATS, MongoDB, Postgres, GCP, CI/CD infrastructure, AWX, Docker, Go, NodeJS or Python.
- You are based in or around Munich and can work on-site (with option for partial home office)
About us
Our team is distributed around the world and comes from strong, diverse work and cultural backgrounds. From Google, Apple, Bosch, Lyft, and Amazon, our technical team are experts in AI, robotics, self-driving vehicles, and logistics.Company at a glance
Cartken is an AI-powered robotics company automating material flow across complex industrial sites with autonomous robots that operate seamlessly indoors and outdoors.
Our robots enable building-to-building transport, eliminating manual handoffs and reducing non-value-added movement in manufacturing, warehousing, and logistics environments.
Cartken offers a portfolio of robots, from compact delivery units to autonomous indoor-outdoor forklifts, supporting payloads from 20 to 1,500 kg (44 to 3,300 lbs). This allows one unified system to scale across different use cases, from small parts delivery to heavy pallet transport.
Designed for real-world operations, Cartken robots navigate uneven terrain, changing weather and lighting conditions, and dynamic mixed-traffic environments, without requiring infrastructure changes. They integrate with existing systems such as doors, gates, and MES/WMS systems to enable continuous transport workflows.
Founded by former Google engineers, Cartken brings deep expertise in self-driving technology to industrial automation, delivering a flexible, reliable solution for modern intralogistics.
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