Head of Software (Robotics/IoT) (San Francisco)

Our client is a venture-backed company building the software platform that operates general-purpose robots: fleet management, productivity, agentic interaction, and the full data-to-deployment lifecycle. This is a founding architecture role. You will own the end-to-end architecture across frontend, backend, and robot-side software, and set the technical direction that keeps a fast-moving, multi-workstream engineering org building toward one coherent system.

It is a rare combination of instincts. It needs someone who has built beautifully designed, fast, coherent productivity software that demanding professionals use daily, paired with someone who has shipped software that controls physical hardware at fleet scale, where connectivity is unreliable and failures have real-world consequences. This is a hands-on leadership role, not a pure strategy seat. You will write code personally, especially in the early stages.

What you'll do

• Design and own the end-to-end platform architecture: robot connectivity and control, fleet management, AI and agentic features, data pipelines, and deployment, as one coherent system rather than a set of services bolted together.
• Set technical direction across frontend, backend, robot-side, and infrastructure teams, and make the architectural calls (build vs. buy, monolith vs. services, sync vs. async, where state lives) that keep everyone aligned as the team scales.
• Architect how AI capabilities (chat, agentic behaviors, learning from fleet data) integrate into the platform safely, with the right abstractions for permissions, observability, and failure containment when agents can act on physical robots.
• Define the developer- and operator-facing experience so the platform feels as considered and fast as the best consumer software, not merely functionally complete.
• Set engineering standards: architecture review, API design conventions, testing and rollout discipline, and how the org decides what is good enough to ship for software that touches physical machines.
• Write and review code directly on critical-path systems, especially in early phases where getting the foundational abstractions right matters more than delegating.

What we need

Deep strength in most of the areas below, and credible working knowledge of the rest. We are hiring for the mental model, not a line-for-line resume match.

• 8+ years in software engineering , including senior, staff, or higher ownership of a large multi-team system architecture, not just a component within one. You can walk through a system you personally built end to end, the tradeoffs you made, and what you would do differently.
• Still hands-on: you write production code regularly and can speak to recent commits or PRs, not just design docs and diagrams.
• Consumer or prosumer SaaS architecture where UX quality, responsiveness, and coherence across web, desktop, and mobile were first-class engineering concerns. Comfort owning frontend architecture (state management, real-time sync, offline or local-first patterns) as well as backend.
• Connected-device systems at fleet scale: device management, OTA update pipelines, telemetry ingestion, and edge-cloud architecture where connectivity is unreliable. Familiarity with the patterns that matter when software controls hardware: near-real-time communication, versioned protocols across fleets running different software versions, safe rollback, and graceful degradation.
• Production agentic systems (tool use, multi-step planning, autonomous or semi-autonomous execution), with a clear point of view on where agents need guardrails, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, or hard safety boundaries. That matters here because agents will eventually act through physical robots.
• Full-stack depth across distributed backends, API design, real-time communication (websockets, gRPC, pub-sub), data pipelines, and frontend, enough to be credible reviewing code and designs in any of them.

Nice to have

• Robotics, autonomous vehicles, or other domains where software failures carry physical or safety stakes.
• OS-level or platform-level experience (mobile operating systems, embedded platforms, or vehicle software stacks). We care about the mental model more than a title match.
• Scaling an engineering org through a Series A to C growth stage.
• Startup leadership, ideally as a first architecture hire or early engineering leader.

Location and process

Onsite, San Francisco Bay Area. We are representing this client confidentially and will share the company name and full details once we connect.