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Serve Robotics is building autonomous sidewalk robots for urban last-mile delivery. The company operates a fleet across Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, Atlanta, and Chicago, and is seeking a Senior Embedded Software Engineer to own critical platform components that power the robotics middleware and application frameworks.
In this role, you will design, develop, test, and maintain robotics middleware and application frameworks using modern C++ on embedded Linux. You'll own significant platform components end-to-end—from technical design and implementation through validation, deployment, and fleet-wide operation. You'll partner with software teams to identify and solve reliability, performance, and developer experience problems, and collaborate with Autonomy and Systems Engineering teams on risk assessments, failure analysis, and software architecture.
Key responsibilities include translating system-level safety and reliability requirements into software behavior and verification strategies; developing instrumentation, benchmarks, logging, and fleet-level metrics to measure and improve performance; diagnosing complex system-level issues involving concurrency, scheduling, IPC, networking, and resource constraints; and evaluating technical tradeoffs to improve platform scalability and maintainability. You will lead technical design and code reviews, contribute to engineering standards and documentation, and provide mentorship to other engineers through design discussions and knowledge sharing.
The role balances hands-on software development with systems-level problem solving and cross-functional collaboration. You may occasionally need onsite access to robotics hardware for integration, testing, troubleshooting, or validation activities.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related technical discipline (or equivalent practical experience)
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant production C++ development (C++17 and newer)
- Experience developing and debugging systems software in embedded Linux environments
- Strong understanding of multithreaded programming, concurrency, synchronization, IPC, and systems-level software development
- Experience designing software for latency-sensitive, safety-related, real-time, or high-reliability systems
- Experience profiling and optimizing embedded software for performance, reliability, and resource utilization
- Demonstrated ability to independently own complex software components through design, implementation, testing, and deployment
- Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills with ability to diagnose complex issues across software and hardware boundaries
- Strong written and verbal communication skills and ability to collaborate across software, systems, and hardware engineering teams
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Experience developing middleware for robotics, autonomous vehicles, or similar complex systems
- Experience developing and deploying production software on NVIDIA Jetson or similar embedded computing platforms
- Knowledge of Linux internals, scheduling, resource management, device interfaces, and IPC mechanisms
- Experience with fault-tolerant architecture, failure-mode analysis, functional safety, or safety-related software development
- Experience with distributed systems, networking, RPC frameworks, or serialization technologies (Protocol Buffers, FlatBuffers, Cap'n Proto)
- Experience developing telemetry, observability, health monitoring, or diagnostic capabilities for robotics or device fleets
- Experience integrating software with sensors, embedded hardware, or other robotic system components
