Senior Engineering Lead, iOS

Key Skills

C++, Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery - CI/CD, Github, Objective-C, 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.

This is an essential problem to solve as the warehouses we serve have typically misplaced over 10% of their inventory worth $10+ million dollars (seriously!). Their current manual techniques for taking inventory are falling down due the e-commerce boom brought on by COVID, and made worse due to the labor shortage and 70% annual staff turnover. Our drones take inventory 15x faster than humans with over 95% accuracy. We deliver this data through our web dashboard, which acts as a DVR for their warehouse where they run their inventory operation. We are the leader in this new market with proven technology. Our drones are live in a dozen warehouses and have scanned over 150k 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.

About You

As a Senior or Lead Software Engineer (iOS) at Gather, you apply your wealth of iOS (and possibly Android) app development experience to the exciting challenge of making flying robots (drones) do real, valuable work. You 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 Do

• Contribute to the team at a senior level by steering our app product roadmap, product designs, software architecture, and by mentoring other less experienced developers.
• 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.
• Re-engineer our iOS application to maximize performance, robustness, and portability.
• Apply best practice CS 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.
• Improve and invent UI/UX, logging, and cloud data synchronization patterns. Gather faces 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.

What You'll Need

• BS in Computer Science/Engineering, or equivalent technical experience.
• Strong interest and experience (10+ years, no upper limit) developing applications that stretch typical app frameworks to their limits, including challenging threading, synchronization, hardware interaction, and real-time interactive UI/UX.
• Deep experience with the iOS ecosystem, including Swift, Objective-C.
• Experience designing and communicating application architectures.
• Experience designing and implementing safe, secure, and efficient data exchange with cloud systems.
• Comfort building and maintaining atypical compilation configurations, and dealing with the more complex than typical library dependency challenges that come with cross-platform robotics/hardware development.
• Good writing skills, mentoring 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...

• Leadership skills! You will be a leader within our iOS team. If the skill and interest is there, Gather is a growing company solving hard problems, which demands highly technical team leads.
• More than 10 years of experience, and possibly some prior startup growth experience. We are a small but fast growing company, and we move quickly!
• Experience with the challenges of maintaining core libraries (C++) across both iOS and Android ecosystems.
• Proficiency and interest in developing cross-platform applications.
• Experience building/maintaining cpu-constrained, soft real-time systems through appropriate threading and task prioritization schemes (like video games!)
• Experience CI/CD testing 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. multi-player games) and the challenges that come with this unique space.

Compensation and Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Comprehensive health insurance
• Very flexible schedule
• Customized PTO