Platform Engineer

The American pharmacy system currently struggles to meet patient needs. Long wait times, overworked staff, and outdated infrastructure have compromised reliable access to essential medications.

We are addressing these challenges today. We are a stealth-mode physical AI company working on a robotic pharmacy product. We are not just conceptualizing the pharmacy of the future; we are building it now.

POSITION: Senior Edge & Linux Platform Engineer (Rust, Linux)

LOCATION: Newark, CA (Hybrid)

EMPLOYMENT TYPE: FTE

REPORTING STRUCTURE: VP of Software Engineering 

About Us

The American pharmacy system currently struggles to meet patient needs. Long wait times, overworked staff, and outdated infrastructure have compromised reliable access to essential medications.

We are addressing these challenges today. We are a stealth-mode physical AI company working on a robotic pharmacy product. We are not just conceptualizing the pharmacy of the future; we are building it now.

About the Role

This is a high-leverage role with end-to-end ownership. You own the software that runs *inside* the robot — the edge agent that orchestrates every dispense, the Linux platform it runs on, and the peripheral integrations that connect compute to the physical machine.

The edge agent is the glue. It takes a prescription, sequences motion through real-time controllers, verifies the dispense with vision, prints the label, talks to the cloud, and writes a tamper-evident audit trail of every action. When something goes wrong on the robot, this is the process that decides whether to stop, retry, or page a human. Getting it right is non-negotiable.

You set the standard for how device software is built, hardened, signed, shipped, and updated in the field. As we scale from 5 robots to a fleet, the platform you build is what makes that scale safe.

You'll work closely with the electrical and firmware engineers on the motor and sensor side, the platform engineer on the cloud side. You own your domain end to end.

What You'll Own

• Edge agent (`edge-agent`) — prescription lifecycle on the robot, device and fill state machines, orchestration of motors, vision, buttons, label printing, and console capture
• Linux platform — minimal, hardened, immutable OS images for the in-robot compute (industrial x86) and the NVIDIA Jetson Thor vision module; kernel configuration, boot, init, packaging
• Secure boot and update path — signed boot chain, dm-verity, A/B partition updates, rollback on failure, key management
• Peripheral integration — CAN, USB, Serial, and Ethernet/TCP-IP links to motor controllers, sensors, button boards, label printers, and cameras
• OTA and fleet update tooling — how a new edge agent or kernel reaches the fleet safely, atomically, and with a verifiable audit trail
• Device telemetry and observability — structured health, metrics, logs, and crash artifacts that make a robot in the field debuggable from the cloud
• Cloud seam - the MQTT/AWS IoT Core boundary that the platform team owns on the other side; you own the device-side contract, codecs, store-and-forward, and reconnect semantics
• Engineering standards - code review, testing patterns, and conventions for everything that ships to the device

Required Qualifications

Must-Haves

• Embedded Linux mastery — You've cut your own distributions. Yocto/Buildroot, kernel configuration, init systems, root filesystem composition, package management. You know what's in a minimal image and what isn't, and why.
• Hardened device platforms — Secure boot, signed kernels and images, dm-verity (or equivalent integrity), A/B partition updates with verified rollback, key and certificate management on device. You've shipped this, not just read the whitepaper.
• Rust on embedded Linux — You've shipped Rust to production on resource-constrained Linux targets. async/Tokio, error handling patterns, type-driven design, cross-compilation, packaging.
• Real-time orchestration and state machines — You've built systems where multiple subsystems (motion, vision, IO) must be sequenced correctly, where partial failure is the norm, and where the wrong state transition is a safety event. Event-driven FSMs are second nature.
• Hardware integration over standard buses — CAN, USB, Serial (UART/RS-485), and Ethernet/TCP-IP. You've debugged a flaky link with a logic analyzer or `candump`, not just a print statement.
• Industrial-grade x86 and ARM compute — You've shipped on at least one industrial SBC or embedded x86 platform and at least one ARM Linux target. You understand the difference between a dev board and a unit that has to run in a pharmacy for five years.
• ARM Cortex MCUs, bare metal and RTOS literacy — You don't have to write the motor firmware, but you have to integrate with engineers who do. You understand bare-metal and RTOS execution models, interrupt latency, and the contracts an MCU exposes to a Linux host.
• Connected device fleets — You've operated devices in the field. OTA updates, telemetry, remote diagnostics, crash collection, recovery from a bricked unit at the other end of a flaky network.
• Safety-critical mindset — You design the failure path first. The happy path is just "recovery wasn't needed." Fail-closed by default; on any uncertainty, the robot refuses to dispense.
• Technical leadership — You've raised the bar on a team. Through code review, architecture decisions, mentorship, or establishing conventions that stuck. You don't need a title to lead.

Important

• NVIDIA Jetson — Thor, Orin, or earlier. Custom L4T images, non-default rootfs bringup, signed boot and update integration.
• Linux kernel debugging — ftrace, perf, eBPF, device tree edits. You find the cause of a kernel oops, not just collect the trace.
• MQTT / AWS IoT Core — Device-side ownership: adapter, store-and-forward, mTLS, reconnect, back-pressure. Cloud team owns the rest.
• Debian packaging — cargo-deb or hand-rolled, with systemd units, postinst hooks, and clean upgrades.
• Supply chain hygiene — cargo deny, signed artifacts, reproducible builds, SBOMs.
• Fault-injection testing — You test invariants under stress, not just examples on the happy path.

Nice-to-Haves

• Healthcare or regulated industry experience (HIPAA, FDA, DEA)
• Functional safety background (IEC 61508, ISO 13849, or equivalent)
• TPM / secure-element integration, key provisioning at manufacturing
• PREEMPT_RT or other real-time Linux experience
• Prior work on robotics, dispensing, or other physical-AI systems
• SQLite, protobuf

How We Hire

Four steps. Tight loop - Thats All! 

1. Recruiter Screen: (30 min) — Motivation, logistics, and whether you naturally think in terms of correctness and ownership. 
2. Technical Interview: (90 min) — You receive a broken infrastructure setup 24 hours before. We discuss your debugging approach, fix and improve together, and talk through operational thinking. 
3. Design Interview: (60 min) — We go deeper on the same exercise. How would you deploy to a fleet of pharmacy robots? What's your staged rollout strategy? What breaks and how do you know? 
4. Leadership Interview: (60 min) — Culture, vision, long-term fit. 

The technical and design interviews are two sides of the same coin — first you build it, then we pressure-test the thinking behind it. 

What We Offer

• Early-stage equity in automated pharmacy dispensing at scale
• Direct impact — your code dispenses medication to real patients
• Small team, zero bureaucracy, high trust
• Hard problems: distributed systems, safety-critical software, regulatory compliance, real-time hardware integration

Compensations & Benefits

• Competitive salary 
• Meaningful early-stage equity
• Health, 401(k)

Why Join Us Now?

Impact & Growth

• Direct Patient Impact: Your code will improve healthcare outcomes for millions of patients
• Market Leadership: Ground-floor opportunity to define an entirely new category of healthcare technology
• Technical Innovation: Work on genuinely novel problems at the intersection of AI, robotics, and healthcare
• Career Acceleration: High-visibility role with significant growth potential as the company scales

Team and Culture

• World-Class Team: Work alongside exceptional engineers, AI researchers, and healthcare experts
• Direct Access: Work directly with the co-founders — with real autonomy and genuine influence over decisions
• Innovation Focus: Culture that prioritizes breakthrough thinking and rapid experimentation
• Mission-Driven: Team united around the goal of transforming healthcare through technology

Our Values

• Servant Leadership – Make those around you better
• Do the Hard Things – Healthcare, hardware, and company - building are all hard. We do them anyway. Convenience for us is life-changing for those we serve
• Own Your Work – Be accountable. Take pride in your output. We live and die by what you do — own it fully
• Default is Now – There's no better time than today. Default to action. What can we prove, learn, or simplify right now

Contact: If you have any questions, please contact us at View email address on us.fitly.work