Founding AI & Robotics Engineer

Full-Time · Remote (US citizen Only)

About Drift

Drift is the world's first AI copilot for robotics simulations. We help developers set up, debug, and run simulations using natural language integrating seamlessly with ROS, Gazebo, and the broader simulation stack. Our mission is to democratize robotics development by reducing simulation time from months to days.

About the Role

We're hiring a Founding AI + Robotics Engineer who sits at the intersection of AI systems and robotics simulation. You'll work directly with the founders to architect and build the core intelligence behind Drift while bringing deep, hands-on robotics simulation expertise to ensure our agent actually works in the real world of ROS and Gazebo.

This isn't a role where you'll be handed specs. You'll shape what we build and how we build it.

What You'll Work On

• Designing and improving the agentic capabilities of Drift from planning and tool use to error correction and self-improvement

• Building context systems that pull relevant information from documentation, codebases, and past interactions using RAG and embedding-based retrieval

• Developing deep integrations between our copilot and the ROS/ROS2 ecosystem, including workspace setup, launch files, URDF configuration, and world generation

• Creating validation frameworks to ensure AI-generated simulation scripts, configurations, and workspaces are correct and robust across Gazebo Classic, Ignition, and Harmonic

• Building internal tooling for debugging agent behavior, measuring improvements, and benchmarking simulation output quality

• Designing feedback loops that help the agent improve over time

• Working directly with robotics developers to understand their pain points and translate them into product direction

What We're Looking For

• 2+ years of engineering experience across software, AI, and robotics systems

• Strong proficiency in TypeScript and Python

• Experience building LLM-based applications agents, copilots, or similar systems

• Deep familiarity with prompt engineering, RAG, and context management

• Hands-on experience with ROS/ROS2 and Gazebo you've debugged launch files, tf trees, and URDF spawning issues

• Understanding of the relationship between ROS nodes, topics, services, and simulated robots

• Comfort across Gazebo Classic and newer Ignition/Harmonic architectures

• Systems thinking you can design how pieces fit together, not just implement them

• Comfort with ambiguity and ownership; you'll be defining the roadmap alongside us

Nice to Have

• Experience with developer tools, CLI applications, or IDE extensions

• Familiarity with evaluation and benchmarking for AI systems

• Experience with multi-robot simulation setups or complex world generation

Why Join Now

You'll be one of the first engineers at Drift, with real ownership over the technical direction. The problems are hard, the scope is wide, and you'll have direct impact on everything we ship. If you want to build tools you'd actually use yourself and make robotics development about innovation, not configuration this is the role.

This position is open to US citizens only.

To Apply

Apply and share your GitHub or relevant work at founders@godrift.ai

Learn more at godrift.ai

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Requirements added by the job poster

• 2+ years of work experience with AI Agents

• 2+ years of work experience with Robotics

• 1+ years of work experience with Context Engineering