Vision / Robotics Engineer

About Loombotic

Loombotic is automating the wire harness, the hand-built nervous system inside every robot, vehicle, and machine. It is one of the last big manufacturing processes still done almost entirely by hand, and we are changing that by building our own instant-quoting software and our own machines, shipping a custom harness in about a week instead of 6 to 12. Teams building robotics, aerospace, and advanced thermal and data-center hardware rely on us to get custom cables in days, not months.

This role builds the perception and robotics at the heart of that.

The role

You'll build the perception and robotics that let our automated line handle wires, connectors, and terminals - parts that are flexible, small, and hard for traditional automation. That means vision systems that find and orient connectors and wire ends, and robot motion that picks, places, routes, and terminates reliably on a real production floor. You'll own problems end-to-end, from prototype on the bench to running in production, working shoulder-to-shoulder with mechanical, controls, and the technicians who run the line.

Problems you'll get to solve

A few of the problems you'd actually work on

Get a robot to reliably pick, orient, and place wires and connectors: flexible, shiny parts that have to be placed and seated to sub-millimeter precision, the kind of work traditional automation chokes on

Build vision that finds and localizes a specific connector, terminal, or wire end in clutter, under real factory lighting, fast enough to keep cycle time low

Solve high-precision insertion and termination: seating a terminal in the right cavity every time, at the tolerances harnesses demand

Drive a vision-guided task from works-in-a-demo to runs-untended on the line, by understanding both the algorithm and how the part actually behaves

Make it robust enough to run unattended on a production line, not just in a demo

What you'll do

Build vision pipelines (classical CV and/or ML) for detecting, segmenting, and estimating the pose of connectors, terminals, and wire ends

Develop and tune robot motion for pick/place, routing, insertion, and termination tasks

Handle camera/robot calibration, hand-eye calibration, and the gritty real-world edge cases

Close the loop with mechanical and controls engineers on end effectors, fixtures, and machine design

Deploy, monitor, and harden systems running on the production floor; debug failures with real parts

Measure and drive up cycle time, yield, and reliability

You are

Hands-on with both code and hardware - happy at a workstation and on the floor with the machine

Rigorous about making things work reliably in the real world, not just in a demo

A fast iterator who learns from physical failure modes

A strong collaborator across mechanical, controls, and production

More interested in the line running reliably than in who gets credit for the fix

Minimum qualifications

Experience building robotics and/or computer-vision systems that ran on real hardware

Strong programming in Python and/or C++

Solid grasp of camera calibration, coordinate frames/transforms, and robotic manipulation

Comfortable working on-site in Austin, TX with physical equipment

Legally authorized to work in the U.S. or Canada

Nice to have

Industrial robot arms, motion control, or real-time systems

6-DoF pose estimation, deep learning for perception, or sensor fusion

Manufacturing automation, machine building, or NPI on a production line

Working with deformable/flexible objects (wires, cables, fabric)

ROS or equivalent robotics frameworks

Bonus

serious Factorio (or other factory-builder game) playtime. If optimizing automated factories for fun sounds like you, you'll fit right in.

• What we care about
• We care about engineers who close the loop on hard physical problems. The best person here gets a flaky vision-guided insertion from 80% to 99.9% because they understand both the algorithm and the way the part