The posting
SENIOR ENGINEER (AI / ROBOTICS / R&D), IN-HOME CARE AI
About Sierra Studio
Sierra Studio is an AI engineering and talent company that partners with a small, highly vetted group of growing companies. We run the hiring process on behalf of our partners, so when you apply through Sierra you get a direct line to the team and a process that respects your time.
Location: On-site, Culver City, CA
Compensation: $180k – $360k base, DOE, plus equity
Reports to: CEO
About our hiring partner
Our hiring partner is a mission-driven technology startup transforming the way in-home care is delivered through innovative AI solutions. Their platform unifies signals from cameras, sensors, wearables, and connected devices to turn raw data into secure, real-time insights and closed-loop care actions; giving families peace of mind, seniors dignified independence, and providers the tools to deliver safer, more proactive care.
They are a small, mission-driven team tackling one of the most important challenges of our time: helping people age safely and independently at home. If that excites you, they'd love to have you join them.
About the Role
Our hiring partner is hiring their first in-house engineer.
They want someone who can open the codebase, test ideas themselves, and get them real answers fast. Someone they can hand an open question to and get back working evidence, not an opinion.
Most of your week will be spent writing code: prototypes, integrations, internal tools, and R&D experiments. The rest goes to being the technical reference inside the company, the person their engineering partner syncs with and the person their CEO turns to when something needs a real answer.
A big part of the job is technical validation. They're constantly running into questions like: can we run this on-device? Is this open source speaker stack good enough? What would it take for a humanoid robot to do something actually useful in a home? You build the answer, bring back your findings, and you and the team decide together what makes it into the product. Turning a question into working evidence in days instead of quarters is the single biggest thing this hire unlocks.
This role is on-site at their office in Culver City, CA. You'll work in person with the team and hands-on with the hardware every day, especially as their robotics work ramps up.
As the team grows, this role is expected to evolve into technical leadership, with the opportunity to hire and lead other engineers. They're looking for someone who is a strong senior individual contributor now and wants that next step.
What You'll Own
Building
Write production and prototype code across the stack. This is a hands-on role, not a supervisory one.
Stand up MVPs and working demos fast, then validate them with real data or real users before committing engineering budget to them.
Build the internal tools and lightweight automation that let a small team punch above its weight.
Ship integrations with the devices, sensors, and third-party services our hiring partner depends on.
R&D and Technical Validation
Take open technical questions (new models, new hardware, new open source components) and turn them into working evidence.
Run experiments end to end: scope them, build them, measure the results, write up what you found, and recommend a call.
Experiment with robotics hands-on. They expect four to five humanoids on site, and someone needs to be in the room with them. Robotics experience is a strong plus, but curiosity and speed matter more.
Evaluate build vs. buy vs. integrate decisions, and be able to defend the answer.
Being the Technical Voice in the Room
Answer day-to-day technical questions from the CEO and the business side directly and plainly, without a translation layer.
Give leadership honest reads on feasibility, effort, and risk, so roadmap conversations are grounded in reality.
Push back on scope creep and unrealistic timelines when a project's ambitions outpace its resourcing, and say so early.
Support in building technical narratives for decks and funding rounds.
Qualifications
Required
5+ years building software professionally, with a track record of shipping things real people used.
Strong hands-on engineering skills. You write code every day and you're good at it: comfortable across the stack, deep somewhere.
Practical AI/ML fluency. You've built with LLMs, speech, or perception systems and understand where they break, not just how to call the API.
Experience taking a product from zero to a working first version, in an environment with incomplete information and no dedicated team.
Excellent written and verbal communication. You'll be the connective tissue between technical execution and business stakeholders who don't share your context by default.
Autonomy and ownership. No one is going to hand you a groomed backlog; you decide what matters this week and you're right about it most of the time.
Strong testing and QA discipline. You write solid tests, think through edge cases, and validate AI and hardware features before they reach users.
Based in the Los Angeles area (or willing to relocate), able to work on-site in Culver City, and authorized to work in the US without visa sponsorship.
Preferred
Experience with robotics, humanoids, embodied AI, or IoT and connected devices.
Comfort with hardware-adjacent work: edge deployment, audio pipelines, sensors, on-device inference.
Experience working alongside distributed engineering teams.
Early-stage startup background. You've been the person who did it all before there was a team.
Product instinct: you have opinions about what should be built, not only how.
Background in a technical discipline (CS, engineering) or equivalent self-taught technical depth.
What Success Looks Like
Open technical questions get answered in days with working prototypes, instead of lingering for a quarter.
Their engineering partner moves measurably faster because you're unblocking them and resolving unknowns ahead of their roadmap.
The robotics track has moved from interesting to demonstrable, because someone was hands-on with the hardware.
Leadership has a clear, current, evidence-based picture of what's technically possible and what it costs.
The CEO spends less time translating technology and more time on the business, because you're covering it.
You've laid the groundwork to bring on and lead additional engineers as the team grows.
A Note on Fit
This role suits someone who gets energy from variety and ambiguity, not someone who wants deep, singular focus on one system for years. We value curiosity, ownership, humility, speed, and thoughtful debate. Strong opinions are welcome, and they should be backed by evidence and a willingness to adapt. If your instinct when facing an unfamiliar problem is to go build something and find out, you'll like it here.
