Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder (San Francisco)

Compensation: c‑suite equity + a modest cash stipend now, moving to market at institutional close

THE VENTURE

We're a stealth robotics startup building real‑time 3D perception to enable robots navigate a building it has never seen, safely, without a lidar worth more than the robot. The platform focuses on delivering accurate spatial understanding, helping robotics systems operate safely and efficiently in real‑world settings. By combining advanced sensing, perception, and software intelligence, iMasiv aims to transform how autonomous systems move and interact indoors. The company is positioned at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and AI, offering significant opportunities for innovation and impact. Prospective team members will join an early‑stage environment where technical decisions directly influence product direction and market success.

Multi‑camera and on‑robot streams fuse into one live, metric memory of a space: a permanent 3D scene graph you can ask in plain language and get back a place, a distance, and a route. It runs on NVIDIA edge compute with TensorRT foundation models, entirely on‑site — no cloud, no footage leaving the building. Our first vertical is large‑scale logistics; the architecture is building‑agnostic.

The hard technical core is built and running today on real hardware — calibration, live metric fusion, cross‑view object association, the scene graph, the query planner, and navigation — architected by a founder with a senior 3D robotics‑perception background at a leading edge‑AI platform. The raise turns that into a team and a product. Full product and architecture shared under NDA once we're talking.

THE ROLE

This is not a blank‑page seat, and we won't pretend it is: the load‑bearing perception core already exists and runs. Your job is to take a system that works on our rig and make it a product that deploys in any building — repeatably, safely, and fast — and to build the engineering team that does it at scale. You own production reality end to end and co‑own the roadmap with the founder.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

• The end‑to‑end technical roadmap — from a system that runs on our rig to a building‑agnostic production product, and the load‑bearing architecture calls that get it there.
• The edge runtime — TensorRT / BF16 engine deployment, GPU‑fused preprocessing, real‑time scheduling, and multi‑camera ingest within a fixed per‑frame budget.
• The model‑to‑engine pipeline — PyTorch → ONNX → TensorRT, on‑target benchmarking (warmup discipline, p50/p95), and accuracy validation before an engine ships.
• Field‑grade calibration and integration — multi‑camera and on‑robot alignment, drift detection, and re‑calibration on floors we did not prepare.
• The navigation surface and safety architecture — the ROS 2 API robots consume, and an advise‑never‑gate discipline: we are never between a robot and its brakes.
• On‑prem deployment — no cloud, no data egress, install‑in‑days repeatability, and the tooling that makes a new building a day of work, not a project.
• Engineering rigor — CI, testing, reproducibility, release, and the safety practices real robot deployments demand.
• The founding technical team — set the skill matrix, close the first hires, raise the bar; and be the principal technical voice in investor and customer diligence.

WHO YOU ARE

• 10+ years of engineering and R&D leadership (or scope‑equivalent), including staff/principal level or a prior CTO / VP‑Engineering role at an early‑stage company. We care more about the scope you've owned than the year count.
• You have personally taken a real‑time perception, robotics, or autonomy system from zero to one and operated it in the real world — not research‑only. This is the line: a research director or a pure ML lead without shipped, real‑world autonomy is not the fit.
• Deep edge‑inference deployment: TensorRT / ONNX, BF16 or quantized runtimes, Jetson / edge‑class hardware, GPU pipelines, and hard real‑time constraints.
• Strong multi‑view geometry / SLAM / sensor‑fusion fluency — enough to own calibration and cross‑view association integration end to end.
• ROS 2, robot integration, and safety‑critical real‑time systems discipline.
• Proven at hiring and leading exceptional engineers — people follow you.
• Graduate degree in Robotics / CV / ML / EE / CS, or equivalent staff‑track depth.

NICE TO HAVE

• Prior CTO or founding engineer at a robotics, perception, or autonomy venture; a prior exit as a technical founder.
• Time inside a tier‑one perception/robotics org — NVIDIA, Skydio, Waymo / Cruise / Zoox, Boston Dynamics, Mobileye, Symbotic, Locus, Covariant, Physical Intelligence, Anduril, or comparable.
• Shipped foundation‑model inference at the edge (depth, detection, segmentation, VLM, embeddings) under TensorRT.
• Warehouse / AMR / industrial robotics deployment; production ROS 2 navigation stacks.
• Named inventor on relevant patents.

COMPENSATION

• Material co‑founder equity — standard vesting with appropriate cliff and acceleration.
• A modest monthly cash stipend now; cash compensation moves to market at institutional close.
• Founder‑level participation in subsequent funding rounds.

If this is the seat you've been waiting for, send me a message. Referrals welcome.