Founding Robotics Engineer

Starlife is building a low-cost, teleoperated humanoid platform designed to bring human intelligence into the physical world. The Founding Robotics Engineer will own the end-to-end design and delivery of the robot—from hardware to software—to enable scalable, remote-work-enabled operations. This founding role offers significant ownership over physical systems design and a path to shape manufacturing and deployment at scale. ## What youll do - Architect and build a low-cost teleoperated humanoid to turn physical jobs into remote work. - Build the initial wheel-based robot for patient check-in in urgent care clinics, including self-charging and safe navigation within a BOM of <$1,000. - Solve the human-robot interaction challenge by crafting a magical experience that achieves a patient preference win-rate >50% compared to in-person staff. - Deploy a fleet of 50 robots in clinics with a Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) target over 500 hours. - Ship the contextual AI copilot that provides real-time guidance to operators, reducing new-hire training time from weeks to 24 hours and signaling the path toward a future physical reasoning model. ## What Starlife is looking for - 3+ years of engineering experience with hands-on ownership of projects. - Mechatronics & Integration: built robots from scratch, integrating motors, sensors, actuators, and compute into cohesive systems. - Embedded Software & AI: reliable firmware development and deploying ML on edge systems with real-time constraints. - Rapid Prototyping: expert in CAD, 3D printing, and quick-turn fabrication; from idea to physical prototype in days. - Design for Manufacturing: cost, assembly time, tolerances, material selection, and scalable production considerations. - Fleet Management: experience deploying and maintaining a fleet of robots in clinical or field environments with uptime targets. - Human-Robot Interaction intuition and understanding of the uncanny valley. - First-Principles Thinking and Radical Ownership: proactive problem-solving with clear ownership of outcomes. - Strong CS fundamentals and a background that supports mechatronics, software, and hardware integration, preferably with healthcare/clinical environment exposure.