Build the Path Forward

At Path Robotics, we’re building the future of embodied intelligence. Our AI-driven systems enable robots to adapt, learn, and perform in the real world closing the skilled labor gap and transforming industries. We go beyond traditional methods, combining perception, reasoning, and control to deliver field-ready AI that is risk-aware, reliable, and continuously improving through real-world use.

Big, hard problems are our everyday work, and our team of intelligent, humble, and driven people make the impossible possible together.

You will play a mission-critical role in architecting our data platform, enabling our machine learning and robotics teams to move faster, experiment more effectively, and deploy AI solutions into production.

This is a founding-level opportunity to lay the groundwork for our entire data infrastructure and build the data team. Reporting to the Director of AI, you’ll collaborate with a talented team of machine learning engineers and software engineers to deliver clean, reliable, and scalable data pipelines that fuel experimentation, production models, and cutting-edge AI development.

What You’ll Do

• Architect and build our end-to-end data platform, including ingestion, transformation, orchestration, quality monitoring, and data access layers.
• Lead initiatives that break down data silos and enable seamless collaboration between business domains
• Design and develop optimized database architecture and data schemas with strategic partitioning for large scale multi-modal data.
• Implement scalable ETL/ELT pipelines that serve experimentation, training, validation, and real-time deployment needs across robotics and AI systems.
• Collaborate with ML and robotics engineers to define and deliver the data infrastructure required for cutting-edge model development and real-world deployment.
• Establish data governance, reproducibility, and lineage standards to ensure data integrity and traceability at scale.
• Develop data contracts and API specifications to ensure reliable data exchange between robotics systems, ML models, and downstream applications.
• Write production-grade, maintainable, and well-documented Python and SQL code for critical data workflows.
• Help shape our MLOps, observability, and CI/CD practices for continuous learning systems in physical environments.

Who You Are

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering, with a strong track record of building scalable data systems and infrastructure from the ground up.
• Previous experience supporting AI/ML teams with data platforms in fast-paced or startup environments.
• Deep proficiency in SQL, Python, and distributed data systems.
• Hands-on experience with tools like AWS, Snowflake, Dagster, dbt, or equivalent modern data stack.
• Experience with streaming technologies such as Kafka, Flink, or similar platforms for real-time data processing.
• Passionate about building clean, reliable data pipelines that power real-time ML and robotics workflows.
• Experience with data quality, observability, and production monitoring of data systems.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and taking ownership. You’re excited to build and own the foundation of a data-first company.
• Bonus: experience working with sensor data, robotics logs, time series, or other high-volume real-world datasets.

Why You’ll Love Working Here

• Daily free lunch to keep you fueled and connected with the team
• Flexible PTO so you can take the time you need, when you need it
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• 6 weeks fully paid parental leave, plus an additional 6–8 weeks for birthing parents (12–14 weeks total)
• 401(k) retirement plan through Empower
• Generous employee referral bonuses—help us grow our team!

Who We Are

Regulatory and Compliance Requirements
This position may support work performed under U.S. Government contracts and requires compliance with applicable federal regulations, including FAR and DFARS where applicable.
The role may involve access to export-controlled information subject to ITAR and/or EAR. Candidates must be able to comply with U.S. export control regulations, which may include meeting the definition of a “U.S. Person” where required.
This position may also involve handling Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and requires adherence to company and federal data protection and confidentiality standards. Employment may be contingent upon successful completion of a background check consistent with applicable requirements.

About Path robotics

Path Robotics is redefining what's possible in autonomous welding. Our AI-powered robotic welding systems use advanced sensing and computer vision to adapt in real time — no fixtures, no programming, no limits. We're building the future of manufacturing, and we're looking for engineers who want to get their hands dirty doing it.

The Role

We're looking for a Software Engineer to build and maintain the infrastructure that powers our AI and machine learning workflows. You'll be the bridge between our AI research team and production — building the tooling, pipelines, and deployment systems that let models go from experiment to factory floor. This is a role for someone who thinks in systems but speaks ML: you understand what researchers need, and you know how to build reliable software around it.

What You’ll Do

• Build and maintain the software infrastructure that supports robot learning, including model training, experiment tracking, versioning, and deployment.
  
  
• Develop pipelines and tools for collecting, processing, and curating large-scale robotic sensor and telemetry data.
  
  
• Support deployment of AI models onto robotic systems, including simulation, hardware integration, runtime monitoring, and feedback loops from field data.
  
  
• Build internal tools that accelerate AI engineering workflows across dataset exploration, testing, evaluation, and productionisation.
  
  
• Partner closely with AI researchers and robotics engineers to turn model requirements into robust, scalable software systems.

Who You Are

• You have 3–6 years of software engineering experience, with solid exposure to ML infrastructure, MLOps, or AI-enabled systems.
  
  
• You write strong production software in Python, and ideally also have experience with C++, ROS, or robotics software stacks.
  
  
• You have experience with PyTorch and a practical understanding of the software systems needed to support AI model development.
  
  
• You are comfortable with data pipelines, simulation environments, containerised workflows, and GPU compute in Linux environments.
  
  
• You enjoy working across AI and robotics, and can support the full path from data collection and testing through to deployment on real systems.

Why You’ll Love Working Here

• Competitive salary and equity in a well-funded, high-growth robotics company
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision benefits
• 401(k)
• Flexible PTO
• Hands-on, collaborative culture

*Path Robotics is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.*

Who We Are

Build the Path Forward

At Path Robotics, we’re building the future of embodied intelligence. Our AI-driven systems enable robots to adapt, learn, and perform in the real world closing the skilled labor gap and transforming industries. We go beyond traditional methods, combining perception, reasoning, and control to deliver field-ready AI that is risk-aware, reliable, and continuously improving through real-world use.

Big, hard problems are our everyday work, and our team of intelligent, humble, and driven people make the impossible possible together.

We’re looking for a Software Engineer with deep experience in C++ and Python to lead the development of core systems powering our intelligent robotic platforms. In this role, you’ll architect and implement high-performance software at the intersection of real-time robotics, perception, and machine learning. You’ll take technical ownership of critical components, mentor team members, and help shape the future of our robotics software stack.

What You’ll Do

• Drive software architecture decisions across robotics and perception systems.
• Design, implement, and optimize performance-critical components of the robotics and perception stack in C++ and Python.
• Develop and integrate 3D point cloud processing algorithms for weld joint perception, including registration, pose estimation, segmentation, and geometric reasoning.
• Lead the integration of machine learning models into real-time systems, ensuring low-latency, high-reliability performance.
• Design and implement gRPC/Protobuf service interfaces with attention to schema versioning and backward-compatible API evolution.
• Instrument perception systems for production observability, building telemetry pipelines that connect algorithmic metrics to business outcomes.

Who You Are

• Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• 5+ years of professional experience in software engineering; title and compensation will be commensurate with experience.
• Solid grasp of system-level software design, concurrency, memory management, and optimization.
• Advanced proficiency in modern C++ and Python, with demonstrated experience building production services using gRPC and Protobuf.
• Experience with robotics or perception applications, including familiarity with ROS/ROS2, motion planning, and hardware interfaces is preferred.
• Proficient in Linux-based development; experience with Docker strongly preferred

Why You’ll Love Working Here

• Daily free lunch to keep you fueled and connected with the team
• Flexible PTO so you can take the time you need, when you need it
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• 6 weeks fully paid parental leave, plus an additional 6–8 weeks for birthing parents (12–14 weeks total)
• 401(k) retirement plan through Empower
• Generous employee referral bonuses—help us grow our team!

Who We Are

Build the Path Forward

At Path Robotics, we’re building the future of embodied intelligence. Our AI-driven systems enable robots to adapt, learn, and perform in the real world closing the skilled labor gap and transforming industries. We go beyond traditional methods, combining perception, reasoning, and control to deliver field-ready AI that is risk-aware, reliable, and continuously improving through real-world use.

Big, hard problems are our everyday work, and our team of intelligent, humble, and driven people make the impossible possible together.

Manufacturing demands exceptionally high performance, reliability, and adaptability. Processes like welding involve fast, complex, and poorly modeled physics that traditional simulators struggle to capture - especially in the long tail of real-world conditions.

We are building intelligent robotic systems that learn directly from data by combining neural world models with reinforcement learning. Our goal is to give robots the ability to learn, predict, and plan in complex manufacturing environments by replacing or augmenting classical physics simulators with fast, high-fidelity learned ones.

We are seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to lead the development of a neural welding simulator - a learned world model that captures the visual and physical dynamics of welding and enables large-scale RL training. This role sits at the intersection of generative modeling, robotics, and applied physics. It is research-heavy by design, while still grounded in production reality.

This role can be located in our Columbus, Ohio Headquarters or Remote.

What You’ll Do

• Build a learned world model of the welding process that predicts future system behavior under robot actions.
• Develop multimodal neural simulators incorporating signals such as 3D scans, video, thermal data, and electrical measurements.
• Design, train, and evaluate large-scale generative or dynamics models (e.g., video prediction, latent world models, 3D or spatiotemporal representations) capable of long-horizon rollouts.
• Collaborate with reinforcement learning engineers by integrating the neural simulator into RL pipelines for policy training and evaluation.
• Run research tracks in parallel with production development, including hypothesis-driven experimentation and ablation.
• Partner closely with data and MLOps teams to support scalable training, evaluation, and deployment - while remaining comfortable owning pieces of the stack when needed.
• Translate research prototypes into robust, maintainable production code when they prove valuable.
• Validate simulator performance against real-world robotic welding data and support sim-to-real transfer.

Who You Are

• Experience building and deploying ML systems for robotics or other complex physical processes in real-world settings.
• Hands-on experience with world models, learned simulators, video generation, 3D modeling, or dynamics prediction.
• Comfortable training large models from scratch and working with the tooling and infrastructure required to scale experiments.
• Enjoy working with messy, real-world data and are pragmatic about imperfect ground truth.
• Strong software engineer with solid Python skills and experience in frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX.
• You are excited by a role that blends research depth with practical impact, and you’re willing to context-switch when the team needs it.

A Note on Background

We do not expect prior welding experience. We do expect comfort modeling complex physical systems from data, reasoning about failure modes, and iterating toward accuracy under real-world constraints.

Why This Role

• You’ll help define the core learning infrastructure that underpins our robotic systems
• You’ll have space to pursue research tracks that run in parallel with production development.
• You’ll work on problems where success is measurable in the physical world - not just benchmarks.
• You’ll join a team that values depth, ownership, and adaptability over narrow specialization.

Why You’ll Love Working Here

• Daily free lunch to keep you fueled and connected with the team
• Flexible PTO so you can take the time you need, when you need it
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• 6 weeks fully paid parental leave, plus an additional 6–8 weeks for birthing parents (12–14 weeks total)
• 401(k) retirement plan through Empower
• Generous employee referral bonuses—help us grow our team!

Who We Are