Chief Scientific Officer

Job DescriptionA venture-backed robotics startup in San Francisco is hiring its first Chief Scientific Officer.\n\nThey are building a six-legged robot with magnetic feet that climbs metal structures to inspect and service critical infrastructure: high-voltage transmission towers, pipelines, tanks, bridges, and shipbuilding hulls. It does the inspection, contact measurement, corrosion checks, light manipulation, grinding and prep, welding, and bolt torque work that drones can't do and that today falls to truck crews or gets skipped entirely.\n\nOff-the-shelf magnet and actuator technology wasn't good enough, so the team built its own proprietary magnet and actuator systems in house.\n\nThey are several robot generations in, with multiple product lines in development, and a longer-term roadmap toward true multi-agent fleet coordination.\n\nThis is a first CSO seat with real influence over where the science goes. You'll own the technical and scientific roadmap, be the primary technical partner to the CEO, and set the direction on multi-agent coordination and physical AI as the team scales toward production-grade reliability and field deployment.\n\nWhat they're looking for:\n\n Experience architecting fleet orchestration or multi-agent systems, at the research or applied level\n A track record of technical or scientific leadership at a venture-backed startup, ideally having shaped an engineering or research org through a similar early stage\n Deep systems thinking across distributed systems, real-time coordination, and fault-tolerant architecture, plus comfort with hardware and software integration\n Strong hands-on credibility with ROS2, C++, and simulation or modeling tools; legged robotics experience is a plus\n Comfort being the technical counterpart to a CEO, including investor and partner-facing conversations\n\n\nBacked by committed seed funding and real customer pull across multiple international markets, riding a strong tailwind of infrastructure investment. Compensation up to $500k plus meaningful equity.