Founding Robotics Engineer

Cota is hiring a Founding Robotics Engineer. You'd be one of our first 6.

Cota is a venture-backed robotics startup building AI-powered robots for retail operations. We're early, we're moving fast, and we're looking for the kind of people who want to be in the room where it happens, not join after the fact.

If you come aboard now, you won't be inheriting someone else's architecture or picking up a half-finished system. You'd be a founding member of the team, owning robotics development end-to-end: defining requirements and system behavior, building and iterating on the software and hardware that makes our robots actually work, and seeing it all the way through to field deployment. A big part of that work lives in the data. You'll be comfortable getting hands-on with data collection in the field and using it to fine-tune Vision-Language-Action models, closing the loop between real-world performance and the models driving it. This isn't a role where you hand off to someone else once the hard part is done. You stay with it, improve it, and own the outcomes.

We care a lot about how we work. High standards, real autonomy, full ownership of outcomes, and no politics. We're building something ambitious and we want people around us who feel that weight and are energized by it, not overwhelmed.

The people who do well here tend to share a few things in common. They're comfortable making calls when things are unclear. They move without being pushed. They want a role where their work shows up in the physical world, not just in a codebase, and where the distance between an idea and seeing it operate in a live environment is as short as possible. And they're excited by the idea of shaping not just the technology, but the culture and standards of the engineering team from day one.