Founding Engineer

About Tekton Dynamics

AI control layer for welding robots

Tech

We are building the "neural stack" for industrial robotics—moving beyond rigid automation toward machines with human-level intuition. The Tech Challenges: - High-Fidelity Perception: Developing a custom hardware/software stack for sub-millimeter 3D environment reconstruction. - Foundational Robotic Manufacturing Models: Training proprietary control models using a massive flywheel of simulation and exclusive real-world industrial data. - Advanced Policy Learning: Pushing the boundaries of RL, Behavioral Cloning, and Supervised Learning to close the sim-to-real gap. We don’t just deploy sensors; we build the closed-loop systems that allow robots to see, reason, and act in complex, high-precision environments.

The role

**Location:** Our industrial lab near London Bridge, in person 5 days/week, occasional travel to industry partners across the UK, Europe, and the US.**Competitive salary:** GBP 100-150K + bonus + meaningful equity.# **About Tekton Dynamics**At Tekton Dynamics, we are on a mission to empower every manufacturer, no matter their scale, to invent and build anything using intelligent robots.We are building the AI-powered control layer for industrial robots — starting with welding.Take a look at [what we’re building](https://tekton-dynamics.com/) and [how we operate](https://tekton-dynamics.com/careers/).**We are:*** **Backed by Y Combinator** **and founders of PayPal, Affirm, Slack** – with a $6M seed round. Scout investments by Sequoia, a16z, Accel, and Kleiner Perkins.* **Founding team of AI PhDs and previous startup CTOs** – everyone has a founder/CTO background.* **Building with real industry partners from the start** – focused on shipping robotic solutions for real-world deployment in record time.# **Your Role**As Tekton Dynamic’s **Founding** **Engineer** , you’ll operate as a core member of our multi-disciplinary product engineering team. You'll be researching, planning, and developing systems and software across our entire engineering stack.**This is not a typical “Software Engineer” role**. You’ll design, build, and maintain core systems that fuse software, hardware and networks. You’ll be both in the weeds with deeply technical subject matter across software, robotics, and AI — and hands-on installing vision sensors, industrial robots, and welding equipment in our R&D lab and our customers’ production facilities.**We value “T-shaped” engineers who:*** Dive into subject matter they are unfamiliar with* Apply first principles to solve technical problems* Index on solving the right problems over finding the perfect solution* Debate with data and logic, and then commit fully to executing team decisions* Appreciate that delivering customer value requires communicating and building trust with our customers**Must-haves:*** 3+ years shipping software in highly technical startup environments* “T-shaped” systems and software generalist* Designed, built and deployed software as part of an engineering team* Comfortable and confident in debugging messy reality: edge networks, hardware calibration, sim-to-real gap* Proven team player, clear communicator; you think from first principles, you identify assumptions and test them methodically, you question the ‘why’ behind every decision**Nice-to-haves:*** Familiarity with training and evaluating machine learning pipelines* Experience in harsh industrial settings (welding/fabrication/heavy industry)* Experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)* Robotics and/or computer vision experience* Edge compute deployments, latency optimization and reliability monitoring# **Example areas you’d be involved in**### **Industrial workflows*** Process 3D CAD models into efficient data structures* Create declarative representations of complex industrial processes### **Perception*** Install, calibrate, and optimize vision sensor capture and fusion pipelines* Train and deploy computer vision models for processing 2D/3D images### **Robot Control and Command*** Tune and optimize our robot motion planning and collision avoidance stack* Build and train AI/machine learning based systems to handle real-world welding scenarios### **Systems, hardware, and integration*** Design and construct sensor enclosures to protect sensors and edge devices* Design robust network architectures with redundancy to ensure always-on and secure access to edge devices* Engage external vendors and integrators to plan and install robotic cells# **Benefits*** Private health insurance + pension contributions* Free lunch* Curiosity allowance (books, learning, memberships)**A note on our in-office culture:** Our team works in our industrial lab near London Bridge five days a week. In our opinion, it’s a core requirement for building physical AI - and we love it. Please only apply if this excites you too.**Join us as our founding engineer and employee #4!**

Skills

• Python
• Machine Learning
• Deep Learning
• Computer Vision
• CAD Design