Software Engineer, Workflow Automation for Robotics
Pave TalentAbout the role
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Pave Talent is hiring on behalf of our client, an early-stage Physical AI company building general-purpose robots that do real work in industrial settings and keep learning while they do it. The founding team came out of leading robotics and AI research groups, the company is venture-backed by major industrial partners, and the robots are already on factory floors instead of sitting in a demo video. Headcount is under 200 and climbing.
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- Engineers who like operational tooling: dashboards, scripts, and glue code that makes other people faster
- Self-starters who take a vague pain point, ask two questions, and ship something useful that week
- People comfortable with light oversight, no heavy process, and a codebase that is young and unfinished
- Contract-comfortable engineers who want frontier robotics on their resume without waiting for a full-time headcount opening
If you want a mature platform team, a detailed spec handed to you, or a fixed 12-month roadmap, this is not your role.
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You own the internal dashboards and automation that the operations, robot fleet, and engineering teams rely on to see what is happening and to stop doing things by hand.
- Small team, direct access to the people who use your tools every day
- Fast onboarding, with a first meaningful ship expected in your first few weeks
- 6-month contract, with possible extension depending on business need
- A direct line to the robotics mission through the tooling the company runs on
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- Maintain and extend internal dashboards for metrics, reporting, and operational visibility
- Build and improve Python and JavaScript scripts that automate manual internal workflows
- Sit with the team to find pain points in existing tooling, then fix them
- Debug and troubleshoot existing scripts, integrations, and dashboards you did not write
- Ship in small increments instead of large planned releases
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This is a contract role at a company still building its foundations. Some of the tooling you inherit will be undocumented. Priorities shift. Conversion to full-time is possible but not promised, so treat it as upside rather than the plan. What you get in exchange is scope that would take two years to reach at a larger company.
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๐ฅ๐ฒ๐พ๐๐ถ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฑ:
- Professional experience writing Python, JavaScript, or both
- Hands-on experience with dashboarding or data visualization tools (Airtable, Retool, Streamlit, Grafana, Metabase, or an internal framework)
- Ability to work independently with light oversight and communicate clearly with non-engineers
- Available to work on-site in San Francisco, Monday through Friday
๐๐ผ๐ป๐๐ ๐ฃ๐ผ๐ถ๐ป๐๐:
- Prior work on a small team, at an early-stage startup, or as a contractor
- Application programming interface (API) integration work across internal systems
- Any exposure to robotics, hardware, manufacturing, or fleet operations data
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๐ฃ๐ฎ๐ ๐ฅ๐ฎ๐๐ฒ: $90 per hour
๐๐ผ๐ป๐๐ฟ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ ๐๐ฒ๐ป๐ด๐๐ต: 6 months, with possible extension
๐๐ผ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป: On-site in San Francisco. Remote within the Bay Area or hybrid is workable for the right person, but on-site is the preference.
๐๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ถ๐ฒ๐ ๐ฃ๐ฟ๐ผ๐ฐ๐ฒ๐๐: 2 interviews, occasionally 3. Fast decisions.
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Interested? Apply via LinkedIn and we'll be in touch. Confidential search. Your application is fully private.
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Responsibilities
- Maintain and extend internal dashboards for metrics, reporting, and operational visibility
- Build and improve Python and JavaScript scripts that automate manual internal workflows
- Sit with the team to find pain points in existing tooling, then fix them
- Debug and troubleshoot existing scripts, integrations, and dashboards you did not write
- Ship in small increments instead of large planned releases
Qualifications
- Professional experience writing Python, JavaScript, or both
- Hands-on experience with dashboarding or data visualization tools
- Ability to work independently with light oversight and communicate clearly with non-engineers
- Available to work on-site in San Francisco, Monday through Friday
Skills mentioned
About Pave Talent
Pave Talent helps high-growth companies hire the people who set them apart. The best people are rarely looking. They're already doing great work somewhere else, often for your competitors. Finding them, earning their trust, and bringing them onto your team takes more than a job post and a database. It takes a real process, genuine outreach, and human judgment. That's all we do. We're a boutique, founder-led firm that runs modern AI tooling at every step, sourcing, matching, outreach, and screening, so we move faster than firms many times our size. But the technology is the floor, not the finish. When everyone has the same tools, the difference is still the people: the ones we find for you, and the ones who decide. Your edge isn't the AI. It's the people who run it. Since 2018 we've made 1,000+ placements across autonomous vehicles, technology and software, manufacturing, life sciences, insurance, and healthcare, for everyone from 50-person startups to the Fortune 500. Over 90% of the people we place are still there and thriving, because we hire for fit, not just a keyword match. We also believe in transparency. We tell you exactly where a search stands, what it will cost, and what to expect, the same straight talk our candidates get. Most firms hide their process. We're happy to show you ours. If you're building a team that has to be exceptional, let's talk.