Robotics / Hardware Engineer

About this role

Lumen Labs | Robotics / Hardware Engineer | San Francisco, CA | ONSITE | Full-time | $130k–200k + equity | https://lumenresearch.coI'm Daniel, co-founder. Lumen Labs is building the cognitive layer for physical AI. Nearly every major robotics effort today teaches machines by showing them thousands of hours of human teleoperation. We think that paradigm has a ceiling, and we're working on nature-inspired architectures for unstructured environments (construction sites, mining, pipelines, battlefield). Pre-seed, backed by top VC funds and operators from robotics/AI companies.
We're a team of two and hiring teammate #3 to own the hardware and infrastructure that keeps our research platforms running: the ROS2 (Humble) stack across onboard and offboard compute, sensor integration and calibration (LiDAR, depth, IMU, encoders), the safety pipeline during autonomous runs, and getting trained policies onto real hardware. Today that's wheeled navigation; we're dipping our toes into drones and eyeing weirder platforms like pipeline inspection. Where we're at: zero-shot sim2real transfer with a policy that runs at 100Hz on an ESP32 and took under a day to train.
You: hands-on with real mobile…