Runtime Generalist Engineer

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

On-site

Department

Engineering

Who We Are

Physical Intelligence is bringing general?purpose AI into the physical world. We are a group of engineers, scientists, roboticists, and company builders developing foundation models and learning algorithms to power the robots of today and the physically?actuated devices of the future.

Achieving real?world performance requires extremely tight system latency, reliable sensor pipelines, and end?to?end engineering that makes perception and control loops work at real?time speeds.

As a Runtime Software Engineer, youll engineer the low?latency, high?throughput systems that underpin our physical intelligence model. You wont be designing ML models - youll be the person who makes them run flawlessly in production, optimizing every layer from OS to camera pipeline to networking. Youll collaborate closely with researchers, platform engineers, and robotics operators to identify bottlenecks and extract maximum performance from the entire system.

The Team

The Runtime team is responsible for building the core platform that Pis robots, sensors, and evaluation pipelines rely on. The team spans Linux systems engineering, camera and sensor pipelines, robot actuator controllers, networking, real?time IO, and performance tooling. They ensure our ML models and control systems operate under strict latency budgets and are robust under real?world conditions.

In This Role You Will

• Own Real?Time Pipelines : Engineer low?latency, high?reliability sensor and actuator pipelines across Linux, drivers, and middleware.
• Optimize System Performance : Profile and optimize across compute, I / O, memory, scheduling, networking, and storage to meet real?time constraints and increase throughput.
• Build OS?Level Capabilities : Extend or modify Linux components, drivers, and scheduling to achieve deterministic behavior under load.
• Streaming & Video Systems : Develop and optimize real?time video streaming systems where frame timing and packet scheduling matter.
• Reliability & Debugging : Build tooling for profiling, tracing, and debugging timing issues across distributed systems and hardware interfaces.
• Cross?Functional Collaboration : Work with researchers, hardware engineers, and operations teams to integrate optimized pipelines into production workflows.

What We Hope Youll Bring

Bonus Points If You Have

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