Lead Software Engineer

About the role

ABOUT TELEKIN

Telekin is building a new way for people to extend their skills and presence into the physical world. Our mission is to make demanding, repetitive and hazardous work safer, more productive and less constrained by geography, starting by deploying teleoperated humanoid avatars in agriculture.

Farming is our proving ground because it is urgent, understood by our founders and underserved by technology. Our Telekins create value today, while capturing the multimodal data required to improve autonomy over time. The long term ambition is much bigger: machines that can take on physical work wherever human capability is needed most on Earth and eventually beyond it.

We are an early-stage, hands-on team who have previously built a profitable agtech business, developed safety-critical hardware and tested systems in demanding real-world environments.

WHY WE'RE HIRING

We're building our founding engineering team as we move from early prototype toward our first real-world deployments. The next phase is about turning ambitious ideas into robust systems that operate reliably in the field.

As one of our first hires, you'll have a level of ownership that's difficult to find in larger organisations. You'll help define technical architecture, establish engineering practices, influence hiring as the team grows and make decisions that will shape the product for years to come.

All roles are fulltime and onsite in the San Francisco Bay Area. These are hands-on roles and cannot be performed remotely.

THE ROLE

Build the low-latency software bridge between humanoid robots in the field and remote operators in another country. You will initially integrate third-party teleoperation middleware, create the operator interface and multimodal data pipeline, benchmark the full system under adverse network conditions and gradually bring the critical stack in-house.

This is primarily a robotics, networking and realtime systems role. The operator interface and data platform are important but they support the central mission: reliable, responsive teleoperation across continents.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

• Integrate third-party teleoperation middleware into the robot control loop.
• Build and optimise audio, video, telemetry and control pipelines for low end-to-end latency.
• Create the operator HUD and remote supervision/intervention interface.
• Build the data pipeline for collecting, cataloguing, storing and curating multimodal motion data.
• Measure and improve glass-to-glass latency, reliability and performance under variable network conditions.
• Test the system to failure and identify bottlenecks across devices, networks and software services.
• Create the foundations for a teleoperator training environment based on recorded test cases.
• Bring critical parts of the stack in-house when technically and economically justified.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• You are a strong production software engineer in C++ and/or Python.
• You have experience with real-time, low-latency or distributed systems.
• You have worked hands-on with robotics, video/audio streaming, networking, embedded devices or comparable cyber-physical systems.
• You can profile latency and reliability across an end-to-end system.
• You can show evidence of shipping and operating software outside a purely web application environment.
• You are able to work full-time onsite in the San Francisco Bay Area.

STRONG ADVANTAGES

• WebRTC, RTP/RTSP, GStreamer, FFmpeg or comparable media stacks.
• ROS or ROS 2.
• Robot control systems and sensor integration.
• VR/XR, motion capture or haptic interfaces.
• Edge computing and systems designed for intermittent connectivity.
• Time-series and multimodal data pipelines.
• Operator HUDs, real-time monitoring or mission-control interfaces.
• Experience with safety-critical or reliability-critical systems.

Tell us why you're awesome via our website: www.telekin.tech