Staff Software Engineer (Boulder, CO)

PickNik Robotics is redefining the robotics industry with MoveIt Pro, a first-of-its-kind platform that combines AI and motion planning to make robots work in the real world. Physical AI is reshaping the field: as foundation models and vision-language-action (VLA) policies move from the lab into production, MoveIt Pro combines these learned approaches with robust, safety-aware planning and control so robots can reliably perform real tasks. Built on over a decade of experience with companies like GM, Philips, Samsung, BMW, Lockheed Martin, NASA, and leading startups, MoveIt Pro brings proven capabilities into production. Join us in helping companies deploy AI to robots quickly and effectively, unlocking new possibilities. This is a challenging, high-impact role with the opportunity to do some of the most rewarding work of your career. PickNik is an agentic-coding-forward company. We use AI-assisted and agentic coding tools as part of our everyday development to ship and maintain high-quality software faster, and we expect engineers to adopt these tools and keep getting more effective with them. As a Staff Software Engineer at PickNik Robotics, you will be the software architect for the MoveIt Pro integration backbone — the layer that turns the work of our robotics specialty experts into a platform that powers robots around the world and in space. You will own the architecture of our behavior tree framework, bridge layer, supporting backend services, and the interfaces with the frontend. You will coordinate between robotics specialty experts and frontend engineers to ship cross-cutting features. As physical AI reshapes how robots are programmed — with foundation models and vision-language-action (VLA) policies joining classical planning and control — you will ensure the integration backbone enables these approaches to work together reliably in production. Expert software design, system architecture, and API design are essential for this role, along with deep C++ expertise. You will also be a champion of agentic coding at PickNik, both as a strong daily user of these tools, and a mentor to the team on using them effectively and safely. You will collaborate closely with robotics specialty experts to build a robotics software platform, so any robotics domain experience is a welcome plus. Am I a good fit? - You love robotics and want to define the architecture of a platform powering robots around the world. - You have owned large codebases end to end and have strong opinions on system design, API design, and long-term maintainability. - You enjoy the integrator role - defining boundaries between subsystems and making specialized work fit together cleanly. - You are a power user of agentic coding tools and enjoy helping a team adopt them. - You have the ability to collaborate with teams around the world. Requirements - Degree(s) in Computer Science, Engineering, Robotics, or a related field, and/or equivalent industry experience. Advanced degrees are a plus. - Minimum 8 years of professional software engineering experience - Expert-level C++ (C++20 or newer), including modern patterns, concurrency, and performance work. - Demonstrated architectural ownership of a non-trivial system — design documents, design reviews, API and contract design, and defining the boundaries and contracts between subsystems for long-term maintainability. - Strong cross-disciplinary debugging skills — able to trace problems across language, subsystem, and stack boundaries to find a root cause rather than a symptom. - Strong Python for backend services, tooling, and infrastructure. - Linux-native full-lifecycle library and application development experience, including CMake, Docker, Git, software testing, and continuous integration. - Hands-on experience with agentic coding tools (such as Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent) and a track record of using them effectively on production code. - Be able to travel to client sites & conferences approximately every other month. Less than 20% of the time. - Live in the Boulder/Denver area and have the ability to be in-office at least 3 days per week. Some preferred skills/experience - ROS 2 or comparable robotics middleware experience. - Familiarity with state management frameworks such as BehaviorTree.CPP. - Experience with communication middleware (such as DDS, gRPC, message queues, WebSocket, or equivalent). - MoveIt, motion planning, kinematics, control systems, model predictive control, or other robotics-library experience. - Simulation experience e.g. MuJoCo, Isaac Sim, Gazebo, or similar - TypeScript and modern React patterns (hooks, context, component patterns) at design-review depth — enough to evolve the typed APIs the frontend team consumes. - Experience designing typed API contracts between native and web stacks, including code generation from IDL or schema. - Experience leading release engineering for a platform shipped to external developers, including apt repositories, Debian packaging, and multi-platform CI. - Experience driving adoption of agentic coding tools at team scale and shaping best practices. - Industry standards work, such as MISRA or space certification. Benefits: - Health, Dental, and Vision insurance - 401k Matching - Paid time off - Opportunity to share in the company’s success through equity Minimum Salary - The minimum salary for this position is $180,000/year.