Senior Edge / Linux Platform Engineer (Rust)
Robot RX
Posted about 5 hours ago
About Us
The American pharmacy system currently struggles to meet patient needs. Long wait times, overworked staff, and outdated infrastructure have compromised reliable access to essential medications.
We are addressing these challenges today. We are a stealth-mode physical AI company working on a robotic pharmacy product. We are not just conceptualizing the pharmacy of the future; we are building it now.
About the Role
This is a high-leverage role with end-to-end ownership. You own the software that runs inside the robot — the edge agent that orchestrates every dispense, the Linux platform it runs on, and the peripheral integrations that connect compute to the physical machine.
The edge agent is the glue. It takes a prescription, sequences motion through real-time controllers, verifies the dispense with vision, prints the label, talks to the cloud, and writes a tamper-evident audit trail of every action. When something goes wrong on the robot, this is the process that decides whether to stop, retry, or page a human. Getting it right is non-negotiable.
You set the standard for how device software is built, hardened, signed, shipped, and updated in the field. As we scale from 5 robots to a fleet, the platform you build is what makes that scale safe.
You'll work closely with the electrical and firmware engineers on the motor and sensor side, the platform engineer on the cloud side. You own your domain end to end.
What You'll Own
Edge agent
edge-agent) — prescription lifecycle on the robot, device and fill state machines, orchestration of motors, vision, buttons, label printing, and console captureLinux platform — minimal, hardened, immutable OS images for the in-robot compute (industrial x86) and the NVIDIA Jetson Thor vision module; kernel configuration, boot, init, packaging
Secure boot and update path — signed boot chain, dm-verity, A/B partition updates, rollback on failure, key management
Peripheral integration — CAN, USB, Serial, and Ethernet/TCP-IP links to motor controllers, sensors, button boards, label printers, and cameras
OTA and fleet update tooling — how a new edge agent or kernel reaches the fleet safely, atomically, and with a verifiable audit trail
Device telemetry and observability — structured health, metrics, logs, and crash artifacts that make a robot in the field debuggable from the cloud
Cloud seam - the MQTT/AWS IoT Core boundary that the platform team owns on the other side; you own the device-side contract, codecs, store-and-forward, and reconnect semantics
Engineering standards - code review, testing patterns, and conventions for everything that ships to the device
Required Qualifications
Must-Haves
Embedded Linux mastery — You've cut your own distributions. Yocto/Buildroot, kernel configuration, init systems, root filesystem composition, package management. You know what's in a minimal image and what isn't, and why.
Hardened device platforms — Secure boot, signed kernels and images, dm-verity (or equivalent integrity), A/B partition updates with verified rollback, key and certificate management on device. You've shipped this, not just read the whitepaper.
Rust on embedded Linux — You've shipped Rust to production on resource-constrained Linux targets. async/Tokio, error handling patterns, type-driven design, cross-compilation, packaging.
Real-time orchestration and state machines — You've built systems where multiple subsystems (motion, vision, IO) must be sequenced correctly, where partial failure is the norm, and where the wrong state transition is a safety event. Event-driven FSMs are second nature.
Hardware integration over standard buses — CAN, USB, Serial (UART/RS-485), and Ethernet/TCP-IP. You've debugged a flaky link with a logic analyzer or
candump, not just a print statement.Industrial-grade x86 and ARM compute — You've shipped on at least one industrial SBC or embedded x86 platform and at least one ARM Linux target. You understand the difference between a dev board and a unit that has to run in a pharmacy for five years.
ARM Cortex MCUs, bare metal and RTOS literacy — You don't have to write the motor firmware, but you have to integrate with engineers who do. You understand bare-metal and RTOS execution models, interrupt latency, and the contracts an MCU exposes to a Linux host.
Connected device fleets — You've operated devices in the field. OTA updates, telemetry, remote diagnostics, crash collection, recovery from a bricked unit at the other end of a flaky network.
Safety-critical mindset — You design the failure path first. The happy path is just "recovery wasn't needed." Fail-closed by default; on any uncertainty, the robot refuses to dispense.
Technical leadership — You've raised the bar on a team. Through code review, architecture decisions, mentorship, or establishing conventions that stuck. You don't need a title to lead.
Important
NVIDIA Jetson — Thor, Orin, or earlier. Custom L4T images, non-default rootfs bringup, signed boot and update integration.
Linux kernel debugging — ftrace, perf, eBPF, device tree edits. You find the cause of a kernel oops, not just collect the trace.
MQTT / AWS IoT Core — Device-side ownership: adapter, store-and-forward, mTLS, reconnect, back-pressure. Cloud team owns the rest.
Debian packaging — cargo-deb or hand-rolled, with systemd units, postinst hooks, and clean upgrades.
Supply chain hygiene — cargo deny, signed artifacts, reproducible builds, SBOMs.
Fault-injection testing — You test invariants under stress, not just examples on the happy path.
Nice-to-Haves
Healthcare or regulated industry experience (HIPAA, FDA, DEA)
Functional safety background (IEC 61508, ISO 13849, or equivalent)
TPM / secure-element integration, key provisioning at manufacturing
PREEMPT_RT or other real-time Linux experience
Prior work on robotics, dispensing, or other physical-AI systems
SQLite, protobuf
How We Hire
Four steps. Tight loop - Thats All!
Recruiter Screen: (30 min) — Motivation, logistics, and whether you naturally think in terms of correctness and ownership.
Technical Interview: (90 min) — You receive a broken infrastructure setup 24 hours before. We discuss your debugging approach, fix and improve together, and talk through operational thinking.
Design Interview: (60 min) — We go deeper on the same exercise. How would you deploy to a fleet of pharmacy robots? What's your staged rollout strategy? What breaks and how do you know?
Leadership Interview: (60 min) — Culture, vision, long-term fit.
The technical and design interviews are two sides of the same coin — first you build it, then we pressure-test the thinking behind it.
What We Offer
Early-stage equity in automated pharmacy dispensing at scale
Direct impact — your code dispenses medication to real patients
Small team, zero bureaucracy, high trust
Hard problems: distributed systems, safety-critical software, regulatory compliance, real-time hardware integration
Compensations & Benefits
Competitive salary
Meaningful early-stage equity
Health, 401(k), unlimited PTO
Why Join Us Now?
Impact & Growth
Direct Patient Impact: Your code will improve healthcare outcomes for millions of patients
Market Leadership: Ground-floor opportunity to define an entirely new category of healthcare technology
Technical Innovation: Work on genuinely novel problems at the intersection of AI, robotics, and healthcare
Career Acceleration: High-visibility role with significant growth potential as the company scales
Team and Culture
World-Class Team: Work alongside exceptional engineers, AI researchers, and healthcare experts
Direct Access: Work directly with the co-founders — with real autonomy and genuine influence over decisions
Innovation Focus: Culture that prioritizes breakthrough thinking and rapid experimentation
Mission-Driven: Team united around the goal of transforming healthcare through technology
Our Values
Servant Leadership – Make those around you better
Do the Hard Things – Healthcare, hardware, and company - building are all hard. We do them anyway. Convenience for us is life-changing for those we serve
Own Your Work – Be accountable. Take pride in your output. We live and die by what you do — own it fully
Default is Now – There's no better time than today. Default to action. What can we prove, learn, or simplify right now
Contact: If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]
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