Deep work.
Four days a week.
A founder-led, fully remote company building its first team around hardware-grade AI for environments where mistakes cost more than money. This is the operating proposal we hire against.
Culture and operating proposal
The interesting parts of robotics are not the parts you can do alone in a room with a laptop. They are the parts where the model trips on a doorframe at 0300 in a smoke-filled corridor; where the gripper that worked in sim refuses to grasp because of a 4°C temperature drop; where the casualty is a real person and the simulator has run out of clever ideas.
To work on those parts seriously, we need to build together, in real time. Not in meetings — we have very few. In the rebuilds, the prototyping sessions, the “what if we just…” conversations that happen live on a call with a build screen shared and a robot in frame. Those don’t happen in a thread you answer eight hours later.
We are designing around four focused build days a week, fully remote, with defined overlap for collaborative sessions. Cameras are optional outside sessions where visual collaboration is useful. The fifth day is Friday: protected time for an experimental company idea, with no success metric. We do not use camera presence as a performance proxy. We track outcomes.
We hire people who have thought hard about the problems we work on and have opinions about how to solve them. Disagreement is welcome — including with the founder, including on ethics. The first person to flag a deployment risk is the most important person in the room that day. Vagueness is the only thing that isn’t welcome.
Ideas are cheap. We want people with a track record of seeing projects through — shipped papers, deployed systems, real hardware that worked.
We do not copy architecture choices because they worked somewhere else. We understand every decision we make. We are comfortable being wrong and updating fast.
We work together in defined synchronous blocks Monday through Thursday, fully remote, then protect long focus windows. Cameras are used when they add context to a collaborative build—not as an attendance signal. We gather in person when the work requires it. Friday is a think day with no standing review. Saturday is off. Sunday breakfast is optional and social.
We assume you’re here because you want this to be the work of your life right now. We make space for the things that don’t fit cleanly into that — chronic illness, disability, caregiving, mental health, recovery, fertility. The schedule we publish is a baseline; if yours has to be different, we find a way without making you ask twice. But we hire people who want to choose this work first.
Disagreement is welcome. But eventually a call has to land. We don’t consensus our way to mediocrity, and we don’t pretend everyone agrees when they don’t. Before a hard conversation begins, we name the decision-maker. We listen hard. Then we tell you why the call went the way it did. Once it lands, we commit — including the people who would have called it differently. Disagree and commit, not disagree and quietly sandbag.
We hire people who want to look back on this decade as the one that mattered. The years here should be the ones you tell stories about — the projects you shipped, the people you built it with, the operators you watched it work for. If you want a long, comfortable arc, we love you for it, but this isn’t your team.
Demos beat decks. Papers beat plans. Real hardware that worked beats a beautiful slide of one that didn’t. We hire people who can put a thing on a table, walk us through what it does, and tell us honestly what it doesn’t do yet.
MON
Demo & plan.Monday opens with a shared planning block. Exact overlap hours and time zone are confirmed during the interview process.
- Defined overlap, disclosed before hire. The expectation is presence for the collaborative blocks agreed with the team—not a ten-hour camera-on day.
- 10am stand-up. 30–90 seconds per person on what ran or didn’t over the weekend, plus anything from Friday’s think day worth surfacing.
- Founder proposes the week’s load-bearing question. One thing. The rest is supporting.
- Tracks split. Main thread and a wedge. People self-assign by the end of stand-up.
- Written commitments by EOD. Posted in
#plans. Short. Future-you will read these on Friday.
TUE–THU
Build.Protected focus time, hardware work, and pairing when it helps. Critique is scheduled inside the agreed overlap window.
- Outcome-based work. Be available for the agreed collaborative blocks, then work where focus is strongest. Late-night availability is not a cultural requirement.
- No standing meetings 10am–5pm. Real focus blocks. If you need someone, ping and hop on a call.
- Hardware time all three days. Whoever holds a rig owns it for the day; hand-offs coordinated in
#hardware. - Optional 5pm critique. Anyone shares a thing on the call; the room takes it apart for 20 minutes. Not for blame — for sharpening.
- Wednesday team dinner on the company. Order in wherever you are; we eat together on the call. Not catered from one kitchen — the tab is covered, the table is shared.
FRI
Think day.10am–6pm, wherever you work best. No standing meetings — the point only works when everyone gets a protected day to chase their own thing. Spend it on an experimental idea for the company. No metric, no review, no “did it work?” conversation. A day to think.
- 10am–6pm, wherever you work best. Shorter than the build week on purpose — think day should leave room for the rest of your life.
- No standing meetings. No status checks. If someone schedules over Friday, push back. Drop into
#think-dayif you want to riff with someone; nobody has to. - Hardware if you need it. If your thread needs a rig, claim one in
#hardware. Use what helps. - Chase one thread. Could be paper-shaped, demo-shaped, or a long write-up in a notebook. Whatever has been pulling at you.
- Optional paragraph at end of day. Anywhere it lives. Nobody reviews it. Helps you remember what you were thinking when you come back Monday.
- “Did it work?” is not the metric. There is no metric.
SAT
Off. Always.Saturday is the company’s promise to itself that there’s a day where work is gone. No Slack, no email, no tinkering-disguised-as-checking-in. We mean it.
- No Slack, no email, no calendars. The apps are on your phone; the obligation isn’t.
- The founder enforces this on himself first. If you get a message from the founder on Saturday, ignore it.
- On-call rotation handles real fires. Schedule is posted in
#oncall. If you’re not on it, you’re off. - Cleanup-disguised-as-checking-in doesn’t count. “Just running a quick demo for a friend” is work. Don’t do it. We mean it.
QTRLY
The day on our calendar
Proposed field day with the people we build for.
As the team and approved operator partnerships grow, the proposed cadence includes a quarterly day in the field: observing a fire crew, an authorized military exercise, an EMT shift, or another approved operating environment. The goal is direct domain context without implying access or partnerships that do not yet exist.
As the team and approved operator partnerships grow, the proposed cadence includes a quarterly day in the field: observing a fire crew, an authorized military exercise, an EMT shift, or another approved operating environment. The goal is direct domain context without implying access or partnerships that do not yet exist.
- Travel, meals, and gear covered. Boots, PPE, helmets, whatever the host site requires.
- Accommodated if you need it. Not every site clears everyone for fire / range / ICU; not everyone wants to be on a wildland engine in July. If a trip isn’t for you, we find a parallel domain visit. The ritual is the engagement, not the badge.
- One paragraph at the end. Anywhere it lives. Written by anyone who feels like writing. Pinned somewhere we’ll see it again.
- At least one operator-shaped problem lands on the roadmap. Every trip generates one. No exceptions.
- The host sets the conditions. Any visit follows the operator organization’s schedule, approvals, safety rules, and access constraints.
Sound like your kind of room?
We’re hiring researchers, robotics engineers, and operators. If you’ve thought about this work in places where it actually mattered, we want to hear from you.