Robotics & Physical AI Architect

Description

Role Overview

As a Robotics & Physical AI Architect, you will define the technical architecture for a large-scale robotics platform supporting heterogeneous robots, AI workloads, cloud services, edge environments, and enterprise integrations. You will establish reference architectures, canonical APIs, protocols, SDKs, and integration patterns that enable multiple engineering teams to build on a consistent platform foundation.

You will work across robotics software, distributed cloud platforms, AI systems, edge computing, networking, security, and developer platforms to build architectures capable of operating thousands of robots across diverse environments. The role requires strong systems thinking, deep software architecture experience, and the ability to influence technical direction across multiple engineering organizations.

Robotics Platform Scope

The architecture is expected to span cloud, edge, robot, AI, data, security, and enterprise integration layers. Representative platform capabilities include:

Architecture Layer

Representative Robotics Platforms / Capabilities

Cloud Fleet & Control Plane

Fleet management; mission planning and orchestration; digital twins; remote operations; telemetry and observability; highly available distributed services.

Robot, Edge & Middleware

Robot identity and provisioning; edge and on-device runtimes; ROS 2, DDS, MQTT, OPC-UA, VDA5050, OpenRMF, and similar middleware and protocols; secure robot-to-cloud communications.

Physical AI, Data & Simulation

Multimodal AI; Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models; embodied AI; reinforcement learning; world models; AI infrastructure and MLOps; robotics data platforms; Isaac Sim, Gazebo, replay, analytics, and benchmarking.

Security & Enterprise Integration

Zero Trust; authentication and authorization; secure communications; OTA updates; device lifecycle management; APIs, SDKs, protocols, and integration patterns for enterprise and industrial systems.

This list is representative, not exhaustive; the role is expected to create reusable architecture across heterogeneous robot platforms rather than own every robot implementation.

Responsibilities

What You'll Do

• Define long-term architecture and technical strategy for robotics and physical AI software platforms spanning cloud, edge, and on-device environments.
• Design scalable platform architectures that support autonomous robot fleets, heterogeneous robot vendors and form factors, AI workloads, and enterprise integrations.
• Architect systems for:

– Fleet management, robot identity and provisioning, and device lifecycle management.

– Digital twins, mission planning and orchestration, and remote operations.

– Real-time telemetry, observability, and highly available, fault-tolerant distributed services.

– Software and model lifecycle management, including secure OTA updates and AI operationalization.

– Robotics data platforms supporting simulation, replay, analytics, benchmarking, and AI model improvement.

– Developer APIs, SDKs, protocols, and reusable integration patterns for robotics applications.

• Define the cloud-to-robot control-plane architecture and canonical APIs that provide a consistent platform across heterogeneous robot implementations.
• Design secure communication architectures between robots, edge devices, cloud services, and enterprise systems, including authentication, authorization, distributed identity, Zero Trust, and secure device lifecycle patterns.
• Define interoperability patterns for heterogeneous robotics platforms using ROS 2, DDS, MQTT, OPC-UA, VDA5050, OpenRMF, and related robotics middleware and industry standards.
• Partner with AI researchers to operationalize multimodal AI, Vision-Language-Action (VLA), embodied AI, reinforcement learning, world models, and future foundation models for physical AI systems.
• Define architecture for AI infrastructure, MLOps, and model lifecycle management across cloud, edge, and robot environments.
• Architect scalable data platforms for robotics workloads, including simulation, replay, analytics, benchmarking, telemetry, and iterative AI model improvement.
• Define clear architecture boundaries and interfaces across cloud fleet services, edge computing platforms, and on-device software so capabilities can be deployed consistently across diverse robotics environments.
• Establish reusable integration patterns across fleet orchestration, digital twins, telemetry and observability, robotics data platforms, AI infrastructure, and enterprise systems.
• Define fleet observability and remote-operations architecture that connects robot telemetry with cloud and edge services for operational visibility and lifecycle management.
• Architect the platform to support multiple robot classes, including autonomous mobile robots, humanoids, manipulators, drones, and industrial automation systems, without coupling the control plane to a single vendor or form factor.
• Partner across robotics software, cloud infrastructure, edge computing, networking, security, AI, and developer-platform teams to operationalize a coherent end-to-end architecture.
• Define security architecture for robots, including identity, secure communications, OTA updates, Zero Trust, and device lifecycle management.
• Establish architecture patterns for highly available, fault-tolerant distributed systems spanning robots, edge platforms, and cloud services.
• Evaluate robotics technologies, middleware, frameworks, simulation platforms, and industry standards to guide platform architecture decisions.
• Drive technical direction across multiple engineering teams and mentor senior engineers and architects.

Basic Qualifications

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience architecting distributed systems operating at large scale.
• Deep expertise in cloud-native software architecture, APIs, event-driven systems, microservices, and distributed platform design.
• Strong programming background in C++, Go, Java, Python, Rust, or similar languages, with the ability to reason about architecture and implementation tradeoffs.
• Experience with Kubernetes, containers, Linux, networking, and modern cloud platforms.
• Experience designing highly available, fault-tolerant systems across distributed cloud and edge environments.
• Strong understanding of systems security, authentication, authorization, distributed identity, and secure communications.
• Strong systems thinking and the ability to work across robotics software, distributed systems, AI platforms, networking, and developer tooling.
• Experience defining APIs, SDKs, protocols, and integration patterns for heterogeneous distributed platforms.
• Experience reasoning across cloud, edge, and on-device architecture boundaries for large-scale systems.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate architecture decisions across senior engineering and product audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience in several of the following areas:

• Robotics software platforms and fleet-scale robotics architecture.
• ROS 2, DDS, MQTT, OPC-UA, VDA5050, OpenRMF, or similar robotics middleware, communication protocols, and interoperability standards.
• Autonomous mobile robots, humanoids, manipulators, drones, or industrial automation systems.
• Edge computing platforms and cloud-to-edge software architecture.
• Real-time telemetry, observability, fleet management, and remote operations systems.
• Digital twins and mission planning or orchestration platforms.
• Distributed databases and robotics data platforms supporting simulation, replay, analytics, and benchmarking.
• AI infrastructure, MLOps, and production model lifecycle management.
• Reinforcement learning, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, world models, embodied AI, or multimodal AI systems.

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