Senior Software Engineer - Tools

Watney

San Francisco, CA

On-site

Who this role is best for

Experienced engineers with data pipeline expertise and a background in robotics will find this tools-focused role in San Francisco.

Best fit for

Candidates with experience building internal tools that become integral to team workflows
— “Have built an internal tool that became the way a team works.”
Individuals with a history of creating visualization tools for sensor and video data at scale
— “Have built visualization or analysis tools for large volumes of sensor and video data.”
Professionals who have designed and implemented data curation and labeling systems for ML training
— “Have designed a labeling or review workflow that people use to annotate data at volume.”

Things to consider

The role requires collaboration across multiple teams, including ML, engineering, and annotators
— “Work with the ML team who train on this data, the engineers who debug the fleet with it, and the annotators who label it.”

How to stand out

Highlight experience with dataset APIs and telemetry alignment in your resume and interview stories
— “Own the viewer engineers use to play back a robot’s data and line up telemetry with errors.”
Emphasize your ability to build annotation tools and curate training sets for ML models
— “Own dataset curation: the dataset API and the tools engineers use to find and group episodes and build training sets.”
Demonstrate understanding of how data quality directly impacts model development and R&D direction
— “Data quality is model quality here. You will own the tools that decide what goes into a training set...”

Pace · SteadyCollaboration · HighAutonomy · HighDecision Impact · Team

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

Developed tools for data playback and error alignment
Built annotation tooling

Typical background

Experience in software engineeringBackground in data analysis

Skills & requirements

Required

Data VisualizationAPI DevelopmentDataset CurationQuality Review ProcessCollaboration With ML Team

Preferred

Robotics ExperienceData Pipeline Development

About the role

Original posting from Watney via Ashby

OUR MISSION
Expand human ambition in the physical world.
Critical infrastructure is constrained by labor shortages, hazardous working conditions, and operational complexity. Watney builds and deploys autonomous robotic systems that increase the speed and capacity of buildout, starting with data centers.
ABOUT THE ROLE
At Watney, a tools engineer builds the tools that turn what our robots record in the field into data our models learn from. Engineers use the same tools to match a change in a robot’s telemetry to the moment an error happened.
What a robot should learn from a day of real work is still an open question: which moments are worth training on, and which labels hold up under review. Some of our best labels come from records captured on site while the robots work.
Data quality is model quality here. You will own the tools that decide what goes into a training set, and what those tools reveal about the data shapes where our R&D goes next.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
Own the viewer engineers use to play back a robot’s data and line up telemetry with errors.
Own dataset curation: the dataset API and the tools engineers use to find and group episodes and build training sets.
Build annotation tooling with the rest of the software team, and weigh what we build against what we buy.
Build the quality review process for annotated data.
Work with the ML team who train on this data, the engineers who debug the fleet with it, and the annotators who label it.
YOU MAY BE A GOOD FIT IF YOU:
Have built an internal tool that became the way a team works.
Have built visualization or analysis tools for large volumes of sensor and video data.
Have built dataset tooling or a data pipeline that ML engineers train from.
Have designed a labeling or review workflow that people use to annotate data at volume.
We’re committed to building a diverse, inclusive team. At Watney Robotics, we welcome people of all backgrounds and identities, and we make hiring decisions based on skills, experience, and potential. If you’re passionate about robotics but don’t meet every requirement, we still encourage you to apply!
CURIOUS TO LEARN MORE?
Follow us here on X https://x.com/watneyrobotics/ and LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/watneyrobotics/about/

Source: Watney careers (Ashby)