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

Sierra Studio is recruiting on behalf of a mission-driven technology startup transforming in-home care through AI. The hiring partner's platform unifies signals from cameras, sensors, wearables, and connected devices to deliver secure, real-time insights and closed-loop care actions. The company is hiring its first in-house engineer, who will write code daily (prototypes, integrations, internal tools, and R&D experiments), act as the technical reference inside the company, and perform technical validation of questions such as on-device execution, open source speaker stacks, and humanoid robot capabilities. The role is on-site in Culver City, CA, reports to the CEO, and is expected to evolve into technical leadership with the opportunity to hire and lead other engineers.

Responsibilities

Write production and prototype code across the stack; Stand up MVPs and working demos fast, then validate them with real data or real users; Build internal tools and lightweight automation; Ship integrations with devices, sensors, and third-party services; Take open technical questions (new models, new hardware, new open source components) and turn them into working evidence; Run experiments end to end, including scoping, building, measuring, writing up findings, and recommending a call; Experiment with robotics hands-on with four to five humanoids on site; Evaluate build vs. buy vs. integrate decisions; Answer day-to-day technical questions from the CEO and business side; Give leadership honest reads on feasibility, effort, and risk; Push back on scope creep and unrealistic timelines; Support building technical narratives for decks and funding rounds

Requirements

5+ years building software professionally, with a track record of shipping things real people used; Strong hands-on engineering skills, comfortable across the stack and deep somewhere; Practical AI/ML fluency, having built with LLMs, speech, or perception systems and understanding where they break; Experience taking a product from zero to a working first version in an environment with incomplete information and no dedicated team; Excellent written and verbal communication; Autonomy and ownership; Strong testing and QA discipline, including validating AI and hardware features before they reach users; 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

Nice to have

Experience with robotics, humanoids, embodied AI, or IoT and connected devices; Comfort with hardware-adjacent work such as edge deployment, audio pipelines, sensors, and on-device inference; Experience working alongside distributed engineering teams; Early-stage startup background; Product instinct; Background in a technical discipline (CS, engineering) or equivalent self-taught technical depth

Benefits

Equity