Head of Infrastructure, Covariant
$250-275k
Office located in Emeryville, CA
AI Robotics company
Job no longer available
AI Robotics company
101-200 employees
Job no longer available
$250-275k
Office located in Emeryville, CA
101-200 employees
Company mission
To build the Covariant Brain, a universal AI to give robots the ability to see, reason and act on the world around them.
Role
Who you are
- Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or closely related field
- 10+ years of experience building systems software, cloud infrastructure, and/or site reliability/data engineering at leading technology companies
- 2+ years managing teams, hiring, mentoring, and growing engineers
- Experience with modern programming languages like Python
- Designed and deployed solutions using public cloud providers like AWS
- Experience with containerization technologies like Docker and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes and Amazon ECS
- Strong communication skills; able to efficiently communicate technical details to a varied audience
Desirable
- Experience architecting data infrastructure for AI systems
- Experience working close to hardware and/or software in the physical world (e.g. robotics, 3d printing, automation)
- Experience managing managers or tech leads
What the job involves
- As the Head of Infrastructure, you will lead the development of Covariant’s core software and compute platform and have oversight over the AI Infrastructure and Production Engineering teams
- The AI Infrastructure team makes Covariant’s robot data accessible and easy to leverage to develop, debug, and deploy AI-based software
- Their vision is to automate and refine every step of the AI lifecycle, from collecting, indexing, and annotating data to training and deploying new models and monitoring performance across the robot fleet
- The Production Engineering team is responsible for the performance, availability, and security of our software infrastructure spanning both cloud (public cloud like AWS) and edge (robot fleet operating in customer sites)
- This spans areas like configuration management, access control, networking, software packaging and deployment, monitoring, security, and incident management
- Onboard in a hands-on technical capacity to get well-versed in our technical stack and deployment workflows (All Covariant engineering leaders are involved in designing and writing software)
- Collaborate closely with product management, field/deployment, AI research, and other engineering teams to put together annual roadmaps and quarterly plans
- Develop a vision for how our core infrastructure evolves to meet company scale and product needs over the coming years
- Hire and manage a strong team of engineers, tech leads, and tech lead managers (TLMs) primarily at HQ but potentially spanning Covariant offices worldwide over time
- Stay abreast of the latest technology developments in AI, robotics, and infrastructure software to chart the best course for Covariant infrastructure
- Be willing to interface with customer technical personnel and participate in cross-functional meetings tackling infrastructure, networking or security questions relating to our robot deployments
- SAMPLE WEEK IN THE LIFE
- In a given week you might:
- Help design and build a new data logging system or debug a performance issue on our edge compute servers
- Join calls with pre-sales and customer teams to discuss technical details of a robot deployment at the customer facility
- Mentor and give guidance to engineers on the team on their projects, and do code reviews
- Help manage a production incident, run a post-mortem meeting, and follow up on action items
- Work with the finance team, IT, and other eng leaders to plan our R&D annual budget
- Meet with the AI research team to gather requirements and understand how to support a new research project, such as training and deploying a new model
- Present team roadmap at the company all-hands or a company leadership forum
- Run weekly team meetings and meet 1:1 with key cross functional stakeholders
Our take
Covariant's investors have solid backgrounds in AI research and academia and have a clear vision of how they want to impact the robotics industry. They have successfully deployed of the Covariant Brain in different sectors, including fashion, health, logistics, and pharmaceuticals.
Robotic AI has made huge leaps in recent years, but a global labour crunch means that supply chain and manufacturing firms are demanding more from their robotic workforces, requiring a precision and dexterity not yet reached without human assistance. Covariant exists to provide just this, outfitting robots with a universal AI for robotic manipulation.
With the global robotics industry expected to balloon to $86 billion by 2027, there is no shortage of firms working in this field. Competitors include Kindred and RightHand Robotics. However, Covariant is unique in its focus on autonomous robotics and in the range of its applications, which can be used in formerly difficult areas such as order picking regardless of the type of objects that need to be manipulated. It also has an edge in that its solution can be deployed to existing robots without new hardware or extensive reprogramming, significantly reducing onboarding costs.
Covariant has received significant funding for its product and is expanding internationally and into new verticals. It is looking to further develop the Covariant Brain and to maintain its market lead as companies continue to double down on investments in automation.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
20% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Apr 2023
$75m
SERIES C
Jul 2021
$80m
SERIES C
Total funding: $222m
Company benefits
- Vision and dental insurance
- Flexible working hours
- Equal opportunity employer
- Work from home opportunities
- Health insurance
- Unlimited PTO
- Lunch and dinner each day (for on-site employees)
- Monthly health & wellness budget
- Quarterly learning budget
- 401k plan and match
Company HQ
Southwest Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
Leadership
Tianhao Zhang
(Co-founder)Tianhao worked as a Grad Researcher during their UCB PhD, before co-founding Covariant in September 2017.
Pieter Abbeel
(President & Chief Scientist)Having taken a PhD at Stanford, Pieter started working as a Professor at UCB in 2008, before co-founding Gradescope and working as an OpenAI Research Scientist. They co-founded Covariant in 2017, where they have worked since.
Peter Xi Chen
(CEO)PhD in Philosophy and a BA in Computer Science from Stanford. Started his career as a Research Scientist at Open AI before co-founding Covariant.
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