Application Engineer, iOS

Key Skills

Apache Kafka, API, AWS, C++, NumPy, Objective-C, R Programming, Swift, UI design, UX design

Job Description

About Us

Gather AI is a supply chain robotics company founded by the PhDs from Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute who created the world’s first provably-safe autonomous helicopter. We have developed an Inventory-as-a -Service platform where fully autonomous drones collect warehouse inventory data at a press of a button.

The warehouses we serve have typically misplaced over 10% of their inventory worth $10+ million dollars/warehouse (seriously!). Their current manual techniques for taking inventory are failing due to the e-commerce boom and made worse due to acute labor shortages. Our drones take inventory 15x faster than humans with over 95% accuracy without the need for humans to climb dangerous heights. We are the technology leader in this new market and the opportunity is huge, with a TAM of over $20B. Our drones are fully deployed in over a dozen warehouses and have scanned over 500K pallet locations.

We are a pure-software robotics company and our key innovation is the world’s only autonomy and machine learning engine that can solve this problem with commodity hardware in GPS-denied environments. That means we avoid all of the hardware development pitfalls of traditional robotics companies and we can scale 10x faster. The robotics industry is starting to enter its “Google era,” and we are leading the charge.

What You’ll Do

• Develop new features, fixes, and improvements to our iOS-based autonomous drone flight control application, including both UI/UX changes and deeper application logic changes, especially those interfaces that build flight plans, monitor flight progress, and help our customers sync those results back to our web platform, all within an intuitive and easy to use interface.
• Collaborate with a team of world-class Autonomy, Machine Learning and Full-stack experts to continue to develop and evolve our automated inventory monitoring and data gathering solutions.
• Express comfort with and grow/mature your application threading, API/communication, and software abstraction principles within an evolving iOS/Android/C++ app ecosystem that interacts concurrently with real hardware, humans, and cloud services.
• Contribute to improving performance, robustness, and portability of our application across different types of drones and use-cases, possibly flexing into some similar Android work, as appropriate/needed.
• Work within our UI/UX, logging, and cloud data synchronization patterns. Gather offers the unique challenge of building a local app-controlled robotic system that operates autonomously and feeds timely data back to cloud-based web applications for deeper analysis.
• Help us evolve our iOS-app based autonomy engine to minimize complexity across dual iOS/Android platforms.
• Build and maintain build scripts, tooling, and unit testing fundamental to building a mature, easy to evolve and release CI/CD application platform.

About you

As an iOS Application Engineer at Gather, you apply your prior iOS app development experience to the exciting challenge of making flying robots (drones) do real, valuable work. You help develop and maintain our combined iOS/Android platform application with our team of world-class autonomy engineers.

For many, this is the dream job that you went into computer science to pursue, but perhaps wasn’t available to you when you graduated because the tech wasn’t ready, or there wasn't a team of world class autonomy and ML engineers backing you up. Or perhaps you’re an app framework or game developer with frontend/backend experience that’s looking to move from controlling virtual characters to commanding robot IRL.

Either way, you’re excited and motivated to apply strong CS fundamentals to the challenges of orchestrating real-time robot motion from an application, moving data through local and cloud-based ML pipelines, all through a great UI/UX.

What You’ll Need

• BS in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent technical experience.
• 3-5 years of interest and experience developing iOS applications.
• Comfort with the iOS ecosystem, including Swift, Objective-C, and ideally some C++ experience as well, as our application is dual-platform and incorporates low-level C++ logic that brings our drones to life.
• Ability, interest, and comfort in implementing/designing MVC style UI/UX interfaces, and working with a graphics designer as necessary to create and update interfaces.
• Some experience interacting with cloud systems/external APIs, local app storage, and other features typically found within iOS applications.
• Knowledge of and comfort with iOS’s threading, callback, and unit testing best practices.
• Good writing skills and a design-for-test ethos.
• Customer obsession! We are a customer-obsessed company. If you are not already customer-obsessed, expect to become so!

Bonus points for…

• Interest and/or experience in Human/Robot Interaction (HRI) and/or robotics, even if only as a hobby or elective. Help us build great, intuitive interfaces!
• Some prior startup growth experience. We are a small but fast growing company, and we are looking for candidates that are ready to grow their skills with us!
• Experience working with shared libraries (C++) brought in via CocoaPods, and more complicated/less trivial build configurations that come with this type of setup.
• Interest and possibly proficiency in developing cross-platform applications.
• Experience developing cpu-constrained, soft real-time applications, like video games!
• Experience working with CI/CD testing tools and releasing production software through the app store ecosystem, in an automated way, e.g. via Fastlane, Bitrise, GitHub Actions, Firebase, etc.
• Prior experience controlling/interacting with hardware from an app.
• A love for robotics and/other real-time multi-agent technology development (e.g. multiplayer games) and the challenges that come with this unique space.

Compensation and Benefits

Compensation package will include a strong equity grant

Comprehensive health insurance

Home office stipend

Very flexible schedule

Unlimited PTO

Our recruitment process begins with a short introductory call and is followed by a series of interviews that will focus on engineering technical, design, and management skills. The process concludes with reference and background checks, followed by an offer decision.