Software Engineer II

Title: Software Engineer II (Robotics) Location: Menlo Park, CA Duration: 3 Months (Possibility of extension) Pay: $70-76/hr on W2 Summary: Join the small team building Conductor, the data and operations platform for our robotics program. Conductor manages high-volume, multimodal robot data from ingestion through quality control, discovery, training, and evaluation. You will own meaningful production systems, work directly with researchers and robotics engineers, and ship quickly with a high degree of autonomy. What you'll do Build reliable backend services, APIs, and data pipelines using Python and Go across PostgreSQL and AWS/S3. Design systems for ingesting, indexing, transforming, validating, and serving large robotics datasets. Develop agentic and LLM-powered workflows for data quality, enrichment, automation, and research productivity, with appropriate evaluations and guardrails. Improve performance, observability, correctness, and operational reliability across the platform. Take projects end to end: clarify requirements, make pragmatic design choices, implement, test, deploy, and iterate with users. What we're looking for Exceptional software-engineering fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, systems, databases, and debugging. Evidence of building a substantial backend, data-intensive, distributed, or developer-infrastructure system through internships, research, open source, or ambitious independent/course projects. Strong programming skills and experience with at least one statically typed language; working knowledge of SQL. Ability to write clear, maintainable production code and reason carefully about reliability, performance, and data correctness. High ownership, intellectual curiosity, sound judgment, and comfort moving quickly in an ambiguous environment. Especially strong signals Maintaining or making substantial contributions to a respected open-source project Internships on data, infrastructure, databases, ML platforms, or developer tools Building useful agentic workflows with real evaluations; systems research; or exceptional technical projects with real users or meaningful scale. A BS/MS in computer science or a related field from a program with a strong systems culture is helpful, but demonstrated ability matters more than pedigree. Pursuant to the California Fair Chance Act, Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, and San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, qualified applicants will be considered for assignment with arrest and conviction records. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness, meet client expectations, standards, and accompanying requirements, and safeguard business operations and company reputation. #TMMT Tailored Management