Robotics Engineer — Early Team (SF)

We’re a seed-stage team in San Francisco building robotic systems to automate real-world lab workflows. Most lab processes today are still manual, slow, and error-prone.

Our goal is to build a fully autonomous, “black-box” lab — systems that can take in high-level inputs and run physical workflows end-to-end without human intervention.

We’re not there yet. The system is still evolving, and a big part of this role is figuring out what actually works and making it reliable.

What you’ll do

Design and build mechanical and electromechanical subsystems
Write the code that actually runs the system (control logic, sequencing, hardware interfaces)
Bring up new hardware and get it working end-to-end
Debug failures across the full system — mechanical, electrical, and software
Iterate until systems are stable and repeatable, not just working once

Required

You’ve built and delivered at least one complex physical system with real ownership
You’re comfortable writing code that interfaces directly with hardware
Strong ability in at least one area:
- Mechanical design
- Controls
- Embedded / systems programming
Experience working with motors, sensors, and power in a real system
Good at solving unexpected problems

Preferred

Experience building systems that had to run reliably over time, not just demos
Experience integrating multiple subsystems into a working system
Prior startup, lab, or independent build experience

Proteins power everything from the cells in your body to creating materials you rely on every day—but until now, we’ve been forced to discover their functions by trial and error. Designing a new therapeutic can take decades and billions of dollars, and even our best industrial catalysts work at a snail’s pace compared to their theoretical optimums.

Anthrogen is changing that. By training massive AI foundation models on protein sequences and structures, we’ve unlocked the ability to generate—on demand—completely novel molecular machines with atomic-level precision. Simply describe the function you need, and our platform imagines the peptide or protein that will deliver it.

We're building models to speed up billions of years of evolution into the span of an afternoon's worth of compute.

The result? New-to-nature therapies, ultra-efficient catalysts for sustainable manufacturing, and a whole new frontier of molecular innovation—designed as precisely as any cutting-edge aircraft or microchip.

Robotics Engineer

About the role