Robotics Engineer

About Lightberry

Lightberry builds the software layer for expressive, interactive robots. We combine voice AI, perception, and behavior systems so robots can understand people and respond naturally.

We are a small, hands-on team based in San Francisco, working across software, hardware, design, and research to turn new capabilities into robots people can interact with today.

We care about thoughtful craft, fast iteration, and shipping real systems into the world.

Robots with Souls

Yep, you read that right.

Robots are here, but they ship with no software. They’re all mute, deaf, and blind out of the box. The only way to get the robot to do anything is to write code. This is insane.

We want robots to behave like in the movies: proactive, caring, aware.

The role

Some code runs in the cloud. Yours runs inside the robot: perception, motion, and expression loops ticking hundreds of times a second on hardware that walks around.

At that frequency there’s nowhere to hide — every millisecond and every megabyte counts. If the backend is the robot’s brain, your code is its reflexes.

What you’ll do

Write the low-latency, high-frequency code that runs locally on the robot: perception, motion, expression.
Squeeze real-time performance out of on-robot compute shared between sensors, models, and behaviors.
Integrate new sensors and actuators, and make their data useful to the robot’s brain.
Profile relentlessly — memory, scheduling, dropped frames. Reflexes can’t stutter.
Test on real robots every day. The lab is full of them.

What’s needed

We don’t care about degrees, titles, or seniority. Show us hard problems you’ve solved — projects, repos, systems running in production. We do need:

Real-time. You’ve written low-latency code that runs at high frequency — control loops, game engines, audio — anywhere a missed deadline is a bug.
Production. You’ve shipped software that runs in the real world, not just in a demo.
Startups. You’ve worked at a startup or pre-Series B company and are used to owning problems end to end.
AI-native. It’s 2026. We won’t force AI tools on you, but we expect you to learn to get the best out of them — they’re a real multiplier, and people who skip them get left behind.
Fun. You write code because you love it — side projects, open source, that tool you built just because.

Bonus points

Robots. You’ve written code that ran on a robot, drone, or embedded device.
Deep cuts. Kernel scheduling, SIMD, RTOS, drivers — you enjoy the layers most people avoid.

One last thing…

Don’t apply if…

You can’t stand chaos
You’d work remotely every day if you could
You’re not a people-person
You’re pessimistic about tech, AI, and the future

Apply if…

You want to do your life’s work
You care about developing and expressing your craft
You love intense, fast-paced environments
You like getting your hands dirty, no work is beneath you
Life’s short, why work on B2B AI SAAS infra slop when you could work on speaking robots?