Cerulion was founded in 2024 by MIT PhDs to modernize robotics. Having grown tired of ROS and utterly abysmal quality of life for robot devs, we are making a backwards-compatible open source robot middleware. We raised a pretty successful seed round from top tier investors and are looking to build a passionate team for the mission.

Overview

We’re looking for a Founding Middleware Lead to join us in shaping the backend, making critical design choices along the way. Performance, developer experience when using endpoint APIs, and extensibility are some of the things you will juggle, while creating the best robot middleware out there.

Everyone on board is an owner of the product we make. We all take responsibility, keep learning from each other, and work together to take on some pretty hard stuff. If this sounds like your cup of tea, rest assured we’ll have a lot of fun together!

Responsibilities

• Work on messaging standards for zero-shot, deterministic robot visualization and development
• Develop an open source robot middleware to implement this standard
• Ensure 100% backwards compatibility with several different versions of ROS/ROS2 (dropping robustness guarantees as necessary)
• Publish and help maintain GitHub repositories, documentation and blogs for the standards and middleware
• Work closely with the visualization and hardware testing teams to ensure the final product is tightly integrated
• Make key architecture and product decisions to ensure extensibility
• Mentor and lead teams of future hires

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience in robotics
• Proficiency in Rust, Python and C++
• Proficiency in ROS
• Familiarity with TCP/IP and UDP, communication protocols, message passing paradigms (pub/sub/query)
• Familiarity with inter-process communication and multithreading
• Strong software systems design skills
• Bachelor’s degree in Robotics, Computer Science, or a related engineering field

Preferred Skills

• Experience with publishing and/or maintaining GitHub libraries for the community
• Experience deploying robot software on hardware
• Master’s degree in Robotics (official name for field of study may be different)
• Familiarity with real time computing
• Proficiency in Godot

We use Rust for the core middleware code, and offer C++, Python and Rust endpoint APIs for developers. Frontend visualization uses the Godot game engine.