Founding Principal Engineer

New York City · Full-time · In person

You’ll own the technical foundation of Gambit end to end — defining system architecture, production reliability, and real-time behavior as our hardware and AI move from prototype to real homes.

This is a hands-on, founding role with direct ownership over the most critical technical decisions in the company.

Why This Role Exists

Gambit is moving from working prototypes to a production system used daily in real kitchens. We’ve validated the core concept — combining RGB vision, thermal sensing, and voice guidance — and are now focused on making the system reliable, observable, and resilient under real-world conditions.

We’re looking for a principal engineer to own that transition: from prototype → production → scale.

System & backend architecture

  • Define clean boundaries between on-device and cloud systems

  • Own the real-time coordination layer across RGB, thermal, voice, device state, and user intent

  • Make latency, failure modes, observability, and graceful degradation excellent

Productionizing from prototype to real users

  • Take a working system into production: reliability at scale, monitoring and alerting, OTA updates, backward compatibility

  • Design for edge cases that only appear in real homes over long runtimes

  • Ensure the system behaves predictably under partial failures, poor connectivity, and hardware constraints

Real-time voice + intent loop

  • Optimize the voice loop for speed, accuracy, and trust

  • Decide what must run on-device vs in the cloud

  • Set confidence thresholds and safe fallbacks when intent is ambiguous or the system is offline

Perception robustness (not model research)

  • Ensure computer vision behaves reliably in messy, real kitchens

  • Focus on integration, reliability, and system behavior — not novel model development

  • Own how perception signals interact with the broader real-time system

Technical leadership

  • Set engineering standards and patterns future hires will inherit

  • Mentor early engineers and raise the technical bar through leverage, not hierarchy

  • Own architectural tradeoffs and technical risk in close partnership with the founders

What you’ll own

What we’re looking for

Deep experience owning production systems end-to-end, from initial architecture through real-world operation

  • Strong backend and systems background, with sound judgment around performance, reliability, and data flow

  • Experience designing real-time or distributed systems under constraints (latency, partial failure, messy inputs)

  • Comfort working close to hardware and sensors, even if you’re not an embedded specialist

  • Ability to move fluidly between architecture, implementation, and debugging

  • Technical judgment that’s been tested by systems that had to work, continuously, in the real world

Prior experience in robotics, computer vision, or embedded systems is helpful, but not required.

Small, senior, highly experienced and technical founding team

  1. Direct ownership over core systems and architectural decisions

  2. Problems at the intersection of hardware, real-time systems, AI, and product

  3. Real users, real hardware, real constraints — no demos-only work

Why gambit

How to apply

Email careers@gambitrobotics.com with a short note about yourself and anything relevant (GitHub, LinkedIn, past systems you’ve built, or problems you’ve owned).