Company Overview
Reflex Robotics is building affordable ($10k) humanoid robots to automate dangerous and repetitive tasks in manufacturing / logistics. We envision a future where everyone has their own “RobotGPT” that can do the boring stuff and help them focus on more fulfilling work.
We are a two-year old startup backed by Khosla Ventures, with $60m/year of revenue lined up pending successful pilots with e-commerce warehouses in 2024.
How does it work?
Our robots are designed & built in-house by an engineering team that led development of the Stretch robot at Boston Dynamics & key parts of the Model S,X,Y production line at Tesla. Reflex robots are high-performance, low-inertia, and designed for low-cost manufacturing.
We've also built a tele-operation system by which someone far away can basically “play a video game” and control the robots in real-time. This lets us do a LOT of tasks on day one, increase autonomy over time, and still have remote operators as needed to ensure that our robots don't make mistakes.
Key Company Beliefs
- Having high quality proprietary data is the key to building generational AI companies. Tesla FSD has 1B+ miles of driver data & ChatGPT has the whole internet - but there is no good dataset in robotics.
- It is pointless to focus on overly academic things (e.g. maximal torque density, 0.1mm actuator precision, getting bipedal robots to walk) instead of actual usefulness to customers.
- Human prosperity increases super-linearly with increased automation. Freedom from dull & repetitive tasks allows us to focus on more rewarding pursuits.
- An insane work ethic is necessary for outsized success.
What We’re Looking For
We are looking for a controls engineer to join our team! We’re still under ten people - so there’s a ton of opportunity for high equity & high product ownership. You should strongly consider applying if:
- You’ve controlled the motion of real-world hardware before, not just in simulation - e.g. nanometer-scale control of EUV lithography machines, or making a quadruped do a backflip
- You like to understand the entire system you’re working with - e.g. you care about details like time-sync btwn two processors, or the stiffness properties of the mechanical assembly
- You have a good understanding of model predictive control, nonlinear optimization, sensor fusion strategies
- You pride yourself on writing robust code that others can trust for years
We primarily use C++, with some Python for prototyping. We don’t use ROS.
You’d be joining at a time when there’s working hardware, working remote-operation software, and a qualified set of pilot customers – the company is de-risked enough to see the hazy outlines of success, but not so large that there’s no remaining upside.
Come join us!