Careers
Build the physical brain of a robot.
Substrate was founded on the belief that a future where robots have true embodied intelligence is fundamentally more exciting than one where they are puppets controlled remotely by datacenters. This requires a specialized NPU that can run a robot policy on board, in real time, on 100 watts.
We are looking for exceptional people to build it with us. These are among the hardest problems in computing, and the first few hires will shape the company. We hire for ability and drive over pedigree, and we expect everyone to own more than their title and argue from measurement rather than opinion. The whitepaper is the technical case, and the plan is how we spend against it.
Open roles
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Founding Chip Architect
Own the RPU datapath: the systolic array, the weight-streaming memory hierarchy, and the fused attention engine. You will work from the calibrated simulator and cycle model to a design that survives the physical-design gates — and set the architecture the compiler targets.
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Founding Compiler Engineer
Build the stack that turns a world-action model into a wired schedule on the RPU: the scheduler today, a PyTorch→StableHLO→MLIR backend as the platform grows. The compiler is where most of the multiplier’s growth lives.
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Founding Research Engineer (World Action Models)
Run robot policies end to end on the RPU and own the demo. You will track the fast-moving frontier of robot-policy architecture, and conduct open-ended research on model compression and efficiency. You will work directly with the CEO on the internal robot-policy and control stacks we are already building.
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Do not see a role that fits? We are small and the problems are large. If you are exceptional at silicon, compilers, or robotics inference, tell us what you would build — we want to hear from you.