{"id":81411,"title":"Tech Lead — Robot Communication & Connectivity (human)","company":"Neura Robotics","city":null,"region":"Baden-Württemberg","location":"Metzingen / Riederich, Riederich, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany","work_model":"onsite","employment_type":"full_time","employment":["full_time"],"roles":["leadership"],"visa":"not_mentioned","relocation":"not_mentioned","posted_at":"2026-05-22T15:11:57.135000+00:00","tools":["gRPC","ROS"],"seniority":"lead","years_experience_min":8,"german_requirement":"not_mentioned","german_level":"unspecified","english_requirement":"required","english_level":"unspecified","team_language":"unknown","confidence":0.4,"method":"rules","language_badge":"Not stated","language_evidence":null,"requirements_snippet":"Industrial fieldbus protocol stack implementation: PROFINET device stack, EtherNet/IP adapter, safety bus design (FSoE/PROFIsafe) Fleet robotics platform engineering: OTA pipelines, VDA 5050 mission protocol, fleet telemetry at …","url":"https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/neura-robotics-gmbh/33ab93d8-1031-4475-adf6-c221e5b42827","source":"ashby","agency":null,"description_text":"Your mission & challenges\nEvery byte of data that moves between a NEURA robot's servo drives and the fleet cloud passes through layers of communication infrastructure. As Staff Engineer for our Robot Communication & Connectivity cluster, you own the technical architecture of that entire vertical — from the real-time drive bus at the hardware boundary, through robot abstraction middleware and industrial fieldbus protocols, all the way up to fleet cloud connectivity and the Neuraverse developer SDK.\nThis is a pure individual contributor role. You carry no people management responsibility. Your authority is technical: you set architectural direction, hold permanent veto on design decisions within your scope, and are the person the team calls when a communication boundary decision is genuinely non-trivial.\nYou will provide technical leadership to approximately 20 engineers across platform guild and product-anchor roles. You write code, lead design reviews, author technical RFCs, and maintain current hands-on expertise across the communication stack. This is not an architecture-only position.\n• Own the architectural direction for the full robot communication stack: real-time drive bus, robot middleware, gRPC control API design, industrial fieldbus protocols, fleet cloud connectivity, and the Neuraverse developer SDK\n• Define and maintain the co-review protocol at the boundary between RT OS scheduling and the EtherCAT master — any board support package change must pass a joint latency budget review before merge; you own this process alongside the Robot Systems cluster lead\n• Own gRPC control API governance: proto contract standards, versioning policy, backward compatibility, and streaming RPC patterns that all robot platform integration engineers implement against\n• Set DDS and ROS2 middleware standards across all platforms: QoS policy, shared-memory transport, zero-copy configuration, and domain isolation\n• Own the protocol stack architectural direction for industrial fieldbus integration: PROFINET, EtherNet/IP, OPC UA, and safety bus implementations; define the boundary between the protocol stack and the industrial interface server layers\n• Drive quarterly cross-team state machine and API design reviews: any transition guard or gRPC API change that could be generalised must be design-reviewed before platform-specific implementation\n• Lead quarterly cluster knowledge days: peer-to-peer problem exchange where every engineer brings one unsolved and one solved problem; output is a shared library ticket or design document, never slides\n• Write design documents that reduce knowledge concentration; mentor Senior engineers toward Staff level; drive cluster hiring sourcing\n\nWhat we can look forward to\n• Real-time communication and networking\n• Hands-on EtherCAT master stack implementation and commissioning on production robot hardware — SOEM, EtherLab, or equivalent; configuration alone is not sufficient\n• IEEE 1588/PTP hardware clock synchronisation implementation experience on physical hardware\n• TSN stack configuration: 802.1Qbv/Qav/AS traffic shaping and deterministic Ethernet scheduling for real-time environments\n• Deep DDS middleware expertise (FastDDS or equivalent): QoS design, shared-memory transport, zero-copy, domain isolation at production deployment level\n• Robot middleware and API design\n• gRPC/protobuf API governance experience at the cross-team level — you have designed APIs that multiple other teams depend on, including versioning and backward compatibility\n• ROS2 middleware stack proficiency: ros2_control, lifecycle nodes, diagnostics framework, launch architecture\n• Robot operational state machine design for safety-critical systems: boot, homing, fault, emergency stop, and recovery cycle patterns\n• C++17/20 at RT loop constraints: lock-free data structures, 1 kHz control loop discipline, latency profiling\n• Staff-level leadership (mandatory)\n• Demonstrated cross-team architectural impact: your design decisions changed how multiple teams work, not just your own domain\n• RFC or design document leadership with cross-team reach: you have resolved interface conflicts between teams and had your proposal adopted as the standard\n• Mentoring track record: at least one engineer you have materially accelerated toward a senior or staff-equivalent level\n• 8+ years of hands-on engineering experience spanning embedded real-time systems and robot communication middleware\n• Nice to have\n• Industrial fieldbus protocol stack implementation: PROFINET device stack, EtherNet/IP adapter, safety bus design (FSoE/PROFIsafe)\n• Fleet robotics platform engineering: OTA pipelines, VDA 5050 mission protocol, fleet telemetry at scale\n• Developer SDK design for external developers: typed node systems, skill marketplace toolchains, API versioning\n• Open-source contributions to robotics communication infrastructure (FastDDS, ros2_control, SOEM, or equivalent)","responsibilities_text":null,"requirements_text":"• Industrial fieldbus protocol stack implementation: PROFINET device stack, EtherNet/IP adapter, safety bus design (FSoE/PROFIsafe)\n• Fleet robotics platform engineering: OTA pipelines, VDA 5050 mission protocol, fleet telemetry at scale\n• Developer SDK design for external developers: typed node systems, skill marketplace toolchains, API versioning\n• Open-source contributions to robotics communication infrastructure (FastDDS, ros2_control, SOEM, or equivalent)","status":"open","duplicate_of":null,"first_seen":"2026-11-04T00:18:09.889475+00:00","responsibilities_summary":null,"requirements_summary":null,"all_tools":["gRPC","ROS"],"posting_language":"en","evidence":[],"years_experience_max":null,"mobility_evidence":[],"model_version":"rules-8","english_badge":"English required","company_id":2275}