The posting
About Menlo Menlo Research is an Applied R&D lab building Asimov, an open-source humanoid robot platform, and the full software stack that powers it. Our mission is to make humanoid labor economically viable, turning software into physical labor at scale. We build across the full stack: hardware architecture, locomotion, autonomy, simulation, and infrastructure. We move fast, ship to real robots, and open-source everything we can. If you want your work to matter beyond a paper or a demo, this is the place.
The Role You'll build the software that turns Asimov from a set of actuators and sensors into a robot that actually works. You'll sit at the junction of hardware, autonomy, and infrastructure, writing the code that runs on the robot, talks to its subsystems, and gets our researchers' work out of simulation and onto real hardware. Full ownership: you write it, you test it on the robot, you ship it, and most of it goes open source.
What You'll Do
- Build and maintain core robot software for Asimov, from hardware interfaces and drivers to the services and APIs the rest of the stack depends on
- Own features end to end, taking each one from spec to code running on a real robot, tested, documented, and merged
- Integrate locomotion, perception, and autonomy modules into a stable, deployable onboard runtime
- Build the tooling that makes the whole team faster: deployment pipelines, logging, telemetry, test harnesses, and sim-to-real workflows
- Debug across the full stack, from a flaky sensor read to a race condition to a memory leak on onboard compute
- Write clean, reviewed code and contribute directly to Menlo's open-source repos
- Work side by side with hardware, controls, and research engineers to unblock them fast
What We Look For
- 3+ years of professional software engineering, shipping production code
- Strong C++ and Python, and fully at home in Linux
- Hands-on experience with ROS 2 or comparable robotics middleware
- Solid grasp of concurrency, networking, and systems programming
- A methodical debugger who's happy getting hands-on with real hardware
- You move fast without leaving a mess behind
- Clear written communication; you document as you build
Nice to Have
- Rust experience
- Embedded or real-time systems work (RTOS, CAN, EtherCAT)
- Simulation tools such as Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, or Gazebo
- Deploying ML models on edge compute (Jetson, TensorRT)
- Open-source contributions you can point us to
- Prior work at a robotics, autonomous vehicle, or drone company
Why Join Menlo You'll write code that moves a humanoid robot in the real world, not just pixels on a screen. You'll own big pieces of the stack from day one, ship weekly to real hardware, and work alongside a small, sharp team that treats every role like a pro sports team spot. Your work will be public, open source, and part of making humanoid labor real. If you care more about your slope than your intercept, you'll fit right in.
