Director of Software Engineering

Burro is the leading robotics company in the world by number of robots working outdoors in the field with real customers. Our mission is to free people from tedious work and solve the critical labor shortages faced by farmers and others that work outdoors. 

To accomplish our mission, we need a world-class, diverse team where everyone feels comfortable sharing their ideas. With this in mind, we strive to create a work environment where every employee can be themselves and express their perspective – this enables us to deliver the most creative and innovative solutions to problems our customers face. 

Headquartered in Philadelphia with an office in central California, and backed by top Agtech and autonomy investors, including S2G, Catalyst, Translink, Cibus, FPrime, Toyota Ventures, FFVC, Xplorer, and Radicle, Burro was created to solve the labor shortages facing farmers using robotics. 

Burros can be described as Disney's Wall-E for agriculture and work outdoors, in a 1.0 format.  They function, today, as computer vision based autonomous ground vehicles for carrying, towing, and scouting, and are designed to lay the base for the fully autonomous future of work outdoors.  We have 700+  robots in our growing fleet deployed in paid commercial use within vineyards, nurseries, berries, and beyond, and demand for our product is accelerating, so we are growing our team.  

The Role

We are seeking a Director of Robot Applications and Behavior to lead the team that owns what the robot does and how people interact with it: the behavior stack and state machines that sequence a mission, the integration work that gets new behaviors from simulation onto robots in the field, the backend communication between robot and cloud, the operator UI, and the details that shape how a Burro feels to work alongside, down to what the lights do. The team is five (5) engineers today, with room to grow as the product scales.

This team also builds the platform the rest of engineering builds on. Autonomy, Perception, and SLAM ship capabilities; this team turns them into behavior a customer can see and use. That increasingly includes AI running on the robot itself. We are bringing voice models to the edge so a worker in a nursery can talk to a Burro and have it respond without a network connection, and this team owns it end to end: on-device inference, the language understanding that maps a spoken request to a mission, and what the robot does when the model gets it wrong.

This is a hands-on director role. You will run the team, and you will also be in the code. This role is designed for a leader who remains deeply committed to technical execution and engineering excellence.

The ideal candidate has built and shipped scalable software on real robots or autonomous vehicles, and has managed engineers before. You will sit alongside our directors of Platform and Integration, SLAM, and Perception, and partner closely with Hardware, Product, and Field Operations.