Member of Technical Staff, Robotics

Member of Technical Staff, Robotics

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: San Francisco

Description Reactor is building the inference platform for real-time world models. Our goal is to democratize access to real-time intelligence to unlock next-generation use cases in media, physical AI and omni-directional models. We already run the largest and fastest catalog of world models on the market, and work closely with all major model labs to run and optimize their world models, including Alibaba, Amazon, and NVIDIA. Our team is made of alumni from leading firms such as Apple, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Luma AI, Adobe, Stability AI, and more. We've raised $74M led by Lightspeed, with Amplify Partners, WNDR, NVIDIA, Sapphire, and other Tier 1 investors participating. Jeffrey Katzenberg, co-founder of DreamWorks Animation, sits on our board of directors.

The Role This is a hands-on role with a lot of scope. You'll help set the technical direction of Reactor's robotics work from the ground up. Day to day, you'll get customer models running reliably on our platform under strict latency budgets, wired into real robots.

We're looking for a generalist across ML, systems and robotics. You understand how a policy behaves at inference time, how batching, scheduling and the network path add to its end-to-end latency, and how its output tensor becomes an action in a robot's control loop.

What You'll Do

Serve robot policies (VLAs, IL/RL models) on GPUs under robot-grade latency budgets, and profile the full path from input tensor to output action

Build the integration layer between Reactor and robot stacks: ROS/ROS2 nodes and bridges, transport, and low-latency channels carrying observations up and actions down

Use world models for policy evaluation, and tune how we serve rollouts for throughput, fidelity and turnaround time

Bring teleoperation and human-in-the-loop experience to our real-time transport: synchronization, jitter and failover for a live control loop

Debug with customer robotics teams across the whole loop: sensor capture, network, inference, action output, robot execution

Help shape the technical roadmap and set the engineering bar for the team around you

Who You Are

You've run learned policies or ML models on real robots or autonomous systems, and debugged failures from perception through policy, control and hardware

Strong ML understanding. You know how modern robot policies (VLAs, imitation learning, RL) and world models are built (transformer backbones, action tokenization or diffusion heads, observation encoders) and how they behave at inference time. You won't be training them.

Depth on inference systems: batching and scheduling, GPU utilization, p99 latency vs. throughput, and running models in real time against physical systems

Strong C++ and Python in production, and comfortable changing performance-critical code

Working experience with ROS/ROS2, DDS and robot middleware, from message definitions to transport QoS settings

Range across ML, systems, cloud infra, networking and robotics. You'd rather fix whatever's blocking the robot than stay in one layer.

The judgment to lead: setting direction, making tradeoffs explicit and representing Reactor in front of customer engineering teams

Bonus Points

World models, video or diffusion models, or learned simulators for policy evaluation or training

Teleoperation: low-latency control loops, sensor fusion for human-in-the-loop tools, demonstration data collection

Inference optimization: INT8/FP8 quantization, CUDA/Triton kernels, TensorRT, vLLM/SGLang-style serving

Real-time networking: WebRTC, RTP/SRTP, QUIC, jitter buffers, frame budgets

Infrastructure: multi-tenant GPU serving, autoscaling, data pipelines, eval tooling

Systems performance: Linux internals, perf/eBPF/GPU profilers, PREEMPT_RT, cgroups, camera pipelines

Humanoid or dexterous manipulation

Early-stage startup or founding-engineer experience

Logistics

We're in person in San Francisco

Benefits

Competitive SF salary and meaningful early equity

Visa sponsorship and relocation support

Generous health, dental, and vision coverage