Director of Software Engineering (Robot Applications & Behavior)

Job description

Burro is the leading robotics company in the world by number of robots working outdoors in the field with real customers. Our mission is to free people from tedious work and solve the critical labor shortages faced by farmers and others that work outdoors. To accomplish our mission, we need a world-class, diverse team where everyone feels comfortable sharing their ideas. With this in mind, we strive to create a work environment where every employee can be themselves and express their perspective – this enables us to deliver the most creative and innovative solutions to problems our customers face. Headquartered in Philadelphia with an office in central California, and backed by top Agtech and autonomy investors, including S2G, Catalyst, Translink, Cibus, FPrime, Toyota Ventures, FFVC, Xplorer, and Radicle, Burro was created to solve the labor shortages facing farmers using robotics. Burros can be described as Disney's Wall-E for agriculture and work outdoors, in a 1.0 format. They function, today, as computer vision based autonomous ground vehicles for carrying, towing, and scouting, and are designed to lay the base for the fully autonomous future of work outdoors. We have 700+ robots in our growing fleet deployed in paid commercial use within vineyards, nurseries, berries, and beyond, and demand for our product is accelerating, so we are growing our team. **The Role** We are seeking a **Director of Robot Applications and Behavior** to lead the team that owns what the robot does and how people interact with it: the behavior stack and state machines that sequence a mission, the integration work that gets new behaviors from simulation onto robots in the field, the backend communication between robot and cloud, the operator UI, and the details that shape how a Burro feels to work alongside, down to what the lights do. The team is five (5) engineers today, with room to grow as the product scales. This team also builds the platform the rest of engineering builds on. Autonomy, Perception, and SLAM ship capabilities; this team turns them into behavior a customer can see and use. That increasingly includes AI running on the robot itself. We are bringing voice models to the edge so a worker in a nursery can talk to a Burro and have it respond without a network connection, and this team owns it end to end: on-device inference, the language understanding that maps a spoken request to a mission, and what the robot does when the model gets it wrong. This is a hands-on director role. You will run the team, and you will also be in the code. This role is designed for a leader who remains deeply committed to technical execution and engineering excellence. The ideal candidate has built and shipped scalable software on real robots or autonomous vehicles, and has managed engineers before. You will sit alongside our directors of Platform and Integration, SLAM, and Perception, and partner closely with Hardware, Product, and Field Operations. ### Responsibilities: - Own the technical direction of the robot behavior stack, including state machines, mission sequencing, user interactions, fault handling, and recovery - Manage, coach, and grow the engineers on the team through weekly 1:1s, clear expectations, and honest performance conversations - Own backend communication between robot and cloud: telemetry, command and control, and behavior when connectivity drops - Own the operator and customer-facing UI, working with Product and design on what the experience should be - Own expressive robot behavior, including lights, sound, and motion cues that tell people nearby what the robot is about to do - Stay hands-on: write and review code, run design reviews, and take direct ownership of components on the team’s critical path - Hire for the team and hold the bar, from writing the role through closing candidates - Partner with the DevOps and QA team on build, test, and release workflows that this team depends on - Set and track the team’s roadmap in partnership with Product, and communicate progress and tradeoffs clearly to the rest of the company ### Requirements: - Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field - 8+ years of professional experience building production software, with a track record of systems that other teams depended on - 5+ years managing engineers directly, including hiring, coaching, and performance management - Experience designing systems and interfaces that other teams build on top of - Experience shipping software on robots, autonomous vehicles, drones, or comparable physical systems. - Strong proficiency in C++ and Python - Experience designing and debugging behavior systems under real-world conditions: partial observability, unreliable state, and failures that only reproduce on hardware - Ability to clearly communicate complex advanced concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders - Willingness to travel occasionally to Burro’s test farm and customer sites to see the robots working in the field ### Nice-To-Haves: - Built or maintained a behavior framework, task planner, or mission executive running across a fleet - Experience with the cloud side of a robot fleet: telemetry pipelines, remote operations, or OTA updates - Proficiency in ROS - Familiarity with web and mobile application stacks, since this team owns operator-facing UI - Experience growing a team through a split, reorg, or fast headcount ramp - Prior startup experience, especially in robotics ### Perks - Competitive salary and benefits package (medical/dental/vision) - Early-Stage Equity - 401K Plan - Unlimited PTO - Paid parental leave