{"id":98369,"url":"https://alion.io/job/sierrastudio-founding-engineer-ai-robotics","title":"Senior Engineer (AI / Robotics / R&D), In-Home Care AI","company":{"id":8919,"name":"Sierra Studio","domain":"sierrastudio.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/sierrastudio","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":81,"open_postings":4,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.75,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"Robotics","role_family":"Robotics","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["BR"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":100000,"max":150000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":150000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Edge AI","optional":false},{"name":"Embodied AI","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-12T16:52:13Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-12","last_verified_at":"2026-10-18T22:40:02Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":67,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":67},"description":"Senior Engineer (AI / Robotics / R&D), In-Home Care AI\nAbout Sierra Studio\nWhen you apply to Sierra, you join an ecosystem. We specialize in connecting talented Brazilian professionals with exciting career opportunities in a highly-vetted small community of growing companies in the US. Applying to Sierra seamlessly integrates you into this ecosystem, granting automatic eligibility for all relevant opportunities we offer.\nLocation: Brazil, remote\nCompensation: $100k - $150k base, DOE, plus equity\nReports to: CEO\nAbout our hiring partner\nOur hiring partner is a mission-driven technology startup transforming the way in-home care is delivered through innovative AI solutions. Their platform unifies signals from cameras, sensors, wearables, and connected devices to turn raw data into secure, real-time insights and closed-loop care actions; giving families peace of mind, seniors dignified independence, and providers the tools to deliver safer, more proactive care.\nThey are a small, mission-driven team tackling one of the most important challenges of our time: helping people age safely and independently at home. If that excites you, they'd love to have you join them.\nAbout the Role\nOur hiring partner is hiring their first in-house engineer.\nThey want someone who can open the codebase, test ideas themselves, and get them real answers fast. Someone they can hand an open question to and get back working evidence, not an opinion.\nMost of your week will be spent writing code: prototypes, integrations, internal tools, and R&D experiments. The rest goes to being the technical reference inside the company, the person their engineering partner syncs with and the person their CEO turns to when something needs a real answer.\nA big part of the job is technical validation. They're constantly running into questions like: can we run this on-device? Is this open source speaker stack good enough? What would it take for a humanoid robot to do something actually useful in a home? You build the answer, bring back your findings, and you and the team decide together what makes it into the product. Turning a question into working evidence in days instead of quarters is the single biggest thing this hire unlocks.\nThe role is remote from Brazil. You should be willing to travel to the US a couple of times a year to work hands-on with the team and the hardware, especially as their robotics work ramps up.\nAs the team grows, this role is expected to evolve into technical leadership, with the opportunity to hire and lead other engineers. They're looking for someone who is a strong senior individual contributor now and wants that next step.\nWhat You'll Own\nBuilding\nWrite production and prototype code across the stack. This is a hands-on role, not a supervisory one.\nStand up MVPs and working demos fast, then validate them with real data or real users before committing engineering budget to them.\nBuild the internal tools and lightweight automation that let a small team punch above its weight.\nShip integrations with the devices, sensors, and third-party services our hiring partner depends on.\nR&D and Technical Validation\nTake open technical questions (new models, new hardware, new open source components) and turn them into working evidence.\nRun experiments end to end: scope them, build them, measure the results, write up what you found, and recommend a call.\nExperiment with robotics hands-on. They expect four to five humanoids on site, and someone needs to be in the room with them. Robotics experience is a strong plus, but curiosity and speed matter more.\nEvaluate build vs. buy vs. integrate decisions, and be able to defend the answer.\nBeing the Technical Voice in the Room\nAnswer day-to-day technical questions from the CEO and the business side directly and plainly, without a translation layer.\nGive leadership honest reads on feasibility, effort, and risk, so roadmap conversations are grounded in reality.\nPush back on scope creep and unrealistic timelines when a project's ambitions outpace its resourcing, and say so early.\nSupport in building technical narratives for decks and funding rounds.\nQualifications\nRequired\n5+ years building software professionally, with a track record of shipping things real people used.\nStrong hands-on engineering skills. You write code every day and you're good at it: comfortable across the stack, deep somewhere.\nPractical AI/ML fluency. You've built with LLMs, speech, or perception systems and understand where they break, not just how to call the API.\nExperience taking a product from zero to a working first version, in an environment with incomplete information and no dedicated team.\nExcellent written and verbal communication. You'll be the connective tissue between technical execution and business stakeholders who don't share your context by default.\nAutonomy and ownership. No one is going to hand you a groomed backlog; you decide what matters this week and you're right about it most of the time.\nWilling and able to travel to the US a couple of times a year (holds a valid US B1/B2 tourist visa).\nPreferred\nExperience with robotics, humanoids, embodied AI, or IoT and connected devices.\nComfort with hardware-adjacent work: edge deployment, audio pipelines, sensors, on-device inference.\nExperience working alongside distributed engineering teams.\nEarly-stage startup background. You've been the person who did it all before there was a team.\nProduct instinct: you have opinions about what should be built, not only how.\nBackground in a technical discipline (CS, engineering) or equivalent self-taught technical depth.\nWhat Success Looks Like\nOpen technical questions get answered in days with working prototypes, instead of lingering for a quarter.\nTheir engineering partner moves measurably faster because you're unblocking them and resolving unknowns ahead of their roadmap.\nThe robotics track has moved from interesting to demonstrable, because someone was hands-on with the hardware.\nLeadership has a clear, current, evidence-based picture of what's technically possible and what it costs.\nThe CEO spends less time translating technology and more time on the business, because you're covering it.\nYou've laid the groundwork to bring on and lead additional engineers as the team grows.\nA Note on Fit\nThis role suits someone who gets energy from variety and ambiguity, not someone who wants deep, singular focus on one system for years. We value curiosity, ownership, humility, speed, and thoughtful debate. Strong opinions are welcome, and they should be backed by evidence and a willingness to adapt. If your instinct when facing an unfamiliar problem is to go build something and find out, you'll like it here.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6699,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Brazil","iso":"BR","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Home Care Services","Angel Networks & Startup Accelerators"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-08-12T16:52:13Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":16,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.466,"p_room":0.35,"age_days":65,"expected_fill_days":29,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":150000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/sierrastudio-founding-engineer-ai-robotics","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/sierrastudio-founding-engineer-ai-robotics.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-19T01:18:59Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":573,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-20T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":8919},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=8919"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fsierrastudio-founding-engineer-ai-robotics"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fsierrastudio-founding-engineer-ai-robotics"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fsierrastudio-founding-engineer-ai-robotics"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/sierrastudio-founding-engineer-ai-robotics\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fsierrastudio-founding-engineer-ai-robotics"}]}