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Job Description

Robotics SLAM Engineer, Gaia AI

To apply, contact peter@gaia-ai.eco with answers to the technical questions at the bottom of this job description, your resume, and why you are interested

Job brief

• You want to design and implement bespoke algorithms yourself and not just use off-the-shelf libraries.
• You write fast code and iterate continuously because you get impatient waiting to see the results of code changes.
• You want to jump right into the robotics codebase, take ownership, and start making contributions.
• You are excited to learn/use the Rust programming language.
• You are excited to contribute broadly and not be constrained by your job description.
• You are self-motivated and don’t want to be micromanaged.
• You want your work to make an impact fighting climate change. You are excited to improve a specialized SLAM system with your knowledge of localization, mapping, and robotics sensors.
• You want to collaborate with similarly motivated engineers and help everywhere you are able.

This is an opportunity to join a well-positioned, ambitious technology startup making a large impact fighting climate change.

About Us

We are currently building our robotics team and hiring for a full-time, in-person robotics SLAM engineer with the ambition to help get things done. This is a great opportunity for someone who wants to apply their skills towards fighting climate change, wants to experience the high-pace, high-ownership setting of an early startup, and can start onboarding immediately or in the next few weeks.

Climate change is one of the most meaningful challenges of our generation, and every possible solution put forward by the United Nations IPCC requires scaled carbon sequestration. Forests are critical for this reason, but a lack of trust is holding back the market for forest-based carbon credits. We are an MIT climatetech startup applying autonomous vehicle technology to solve this problem, utilizing cutting edge sensors and perception AI to verify forest-based carbon credits with great accuracy and confidence.

Diversity Statement

At Gaia AI, we strive to grow each employee to their full unique potential and we value and celebrate each person as they are. We are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. These values make us all more insightful and effective. Gaia AI does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, or any other distinction unrelated to job performance. We especially encourage applications from minorities, women, people with disabilities, and all other qualified candidates.

Responsibilities (may include)

• Collaborate with stakeholders and other team members to define the scope and scale of robotics projects
• Research, implement, and improve algorithms from robotics papers
• Evaluate and write drivers and visualizations for sensors
• Develop and maintain internal robotics tools
• Identify bottlenecks and improve software efficiency
• Design software architecture
• Design, implement, and integrate data pipelines
• Deploy to AWS using Docker
• Write technical documentation

Requirements

• Strong systems programming experience (C/C++/Rust)
• Experience with SLAM algorithms and robotics perception in general
• Team spirit; strong communication and collaboration skills
• Good time-management skills

To apply, please answer the below questions and email your answers to Peter McHale at peter@gaia-ai.eco, as well as your resume and why you are interested in the role. In order to consider candidates who are truly interested in what we are building at Gaia AI, applications without answers to these questions will not be considered.

• What data structures do you use the most and how do you choose between them? Illustrate with specific examples, avoiding vague generalities. Enthusiasm and strong conviction preferred!

• While C/C++ are famous for pointers and the bugs associated with them, understanding pointers is critical for effective programming in every language. Please provide a couple concrete examples of pointer-based bugs in a scripting language (e.g. Python or Javascript) and then also show the equivalent bug in C/C++ (or another system language).



• Gaia AI foresters perform data collection by hiking with our sensor backpack. Give an overview of a complete factor graph localization system for a sensor backpack in a forest environment. What specific low-level libraries and algorithms would you use? What kinds of factors would you use? What problems are likely to come up and how would you try to resolve them to make the localization robust?