Senior Engineer (AI / Robotics / R&D), In-Home Care AI

About the role

A small, mission-driven technology startup, hired through Sierra Studio, is hiring its first in-house engineer. The company builds AI solutions that unify signals from cameras, sensors, wearables and connected devices into secure, real-time insights and closed-loop care actions for in-home care. The role is on-site in Culver City, CA, and reports to the CEO. Most of the week is writing code: prototypes, integrations, internal tools and R&D experiments, with the rest spent as the technical reference for the team.

Key responsibilities

• Build production and prototype code across the stack, stand up MVPs and demos and validate them with real data or users.
• Build internal tools and lightweight automation for a small team.
• Ship integrations with devices, sensors and third-party services.
• Turn open technical questions into working evidence: run end-to-end experiments, measure results and recommend next steps.
• Experiment hands-on with robotics, including four to five humanoids on site; robotics experience is a strong plus.
• Evaluate build vs. buy vs. integrate decisions and give the CEO and business stakeholders honest, evidence-based reads on feasibility, effort and risk.
• Support technical narratives for decks and funding rounds.

Required profile

• 5+ years of professional software development with shipped products.
• Strong hands-on engineering skills, comfortable across the stack and deep somewhere.
• Practical AI/ML fluency, having built with LLMs, speech or perception systems.
• Experience taking a product from zero to a first version in an incomplete-information environment.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, autonomy and ownership, and strong testing and QA discipline.
• 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

• Robotics, humanoids, embodied AI, IoT or connected devices experience.
• Hardware-adjacent work: edge deployment, audio pipelines, sensors, on-device inference.
• Distributed engineering team experience and early-stage startup background.

What we offer

• Base pay of $180k - $360k depending on experience, plus equity.
• On-site work in Culver City, with the chance to evolve into technical leadership and hire other engineers as the team grows.