Embedded Linux Robotics Software Engineer
Embedded Linux Robotics Software Engineer at Proception Inc — Palo Alto, CA, US
- Company: Proception Inc
- Location: Palo Alto, CA, US
- Employment type: FULL_TIME
- Salary: USD 100000–200000 / year
- Posted: 2026-07-17
About this role
Real-Time Systems, Cameras, and Robot Runtime Infrastructure
At Proception, we are building dexterous humanoid robotic hands for the next generation of manipulation models. Our hands combine high-DOF actuation, tactile sensing, visual feedback, and real-time control systems to help robots interact with the physical world with human-level dexterity.
This role is for someone who likes being close to the hardware, close to Linux, and close to the robot. You will work across embedded Linux, camera bring-up, real-time sensing, IPC, device drivers, and high-rate robotics runtime systems.
The Team
We are working on robotics, dexterous manipulation, embedded systems, and real-world AI deployment. We started Proception because we realized that humanoid hands are one of the biggest bottlenecks to building general-purpose robots.
The next generation of robot intelligence will not come from better models alone. It also needs better hands, better sensors, better data, and better real-time systems. That is what we are building.
What You Will Own
Instead of joining a large team to maintain legacy infrastructure, you will directly bring up and improve the systems that make our robotic hands work in the real world.
First 30 Days
You will:
Understand our embedded Linux stack, robot runtime, sensing architecture, and hardware bring-up flow
Bring up or debug camera pipelines on Jetson Orin, RK3588, or custom embedded boards
Work with V4L2, Media Controller, libcamera, device tree, and kernel logs to validate sensor paths
Profile latency across camera, tactile, IPC, perception, and control pipelines
Contribute fixes to real-time sensing and actuation services
First 60 Days
You will:
Improve reliability of high-rate data pipelines for cameras, tactile sensors, encoders, and control loops
Optimize Linux scheduling, CPU isolation, memory locking, IO paths, and process coordination
Integrate low-level drivers, kernel modules, or hardware interfaces into the robot runtime
Build diagnostics for latency, dropped frames, IPC failures, sensor health, and system-level timing
Help create hardware-in-the-loop test infrastructure for robot subsystems
First 90 Days
You will:
Own the embedded Linux camera stack for a prototype robotic hand or upper-body system
Reduce latency and jitter in the tactile-visual-control feedback loop
Support multi-camera synchronization, hardware triggering, and calibration workflows
Build robust logging, monitoring, and field diagnostics for camera and sensing subsystems
Help define the architecture for Proception’s real-time robotics runtime
Must-Haves
Demonstrated ability to build reliable software on embedded Linux systems using C/C++ or Rust
Strong Linux system programming fundamentals, including threading, IPC, scheduling, memory management, DMA, interrupts, and debugging
Hands-on experience with embedded camera stacks such as V4L2, Media Controller, libcamera, MIPI CSI-2, device tree, or sensor drivers
Experience bringing up hardware interfaces such as CSI-2, SPI, I2C, UART, CAN, EtherCAT, USB, or PCIe
Ability to debug real hardware using tools such as gdb, perf, strace, dmesg, ftrace, logic analyzers, and oscilloscopes
Experience building low-latency sensing, perception, actuation, or control pipelines
Comfort working across software, firmware, electrical, mechanical, and robotics teams
Nice-to-Haves
Experience with PREEMPT_RT, CPU isolation, real-time Linux tuning, or deterministic userland runtime design
Experience with Jetson Orin, RK3588, Yocto, Buildroot, Debian-based embedded systems, or custom carrier boards
Familiarity with ROS/ROS2, DDS, ZeroMQ, shared-memory IPC, GPU acceleration, camera calibration, stereo vision, or SLAM
You Might Be a Fit If
You enjoy debugging problems where the answer might be in the kernel log, an oscilloscope trace, a device tree overlay, a dropped frame counter, or a scheduler trace.
You like robots, but you do not need a polished robotics framework to be productive. You are comfortable building the plumbing that makes high-performance robots actually work.
Why Join
This is a rare chance to work on the low-level systems behind dexterous humanoid manipulation. Your work will directly affect the speed, reliability, and intelligence of our robotic hands.
You will not just be writing infrastructure. You will be building the nervous system of a robot