NEO is a home robot that handles chores and provides personalized assistance. Companion Mode is NEO's real-time interaction layer: voice-first, always available, and reliable under messy real-world conditions.

As a Software Engineer, you'll build the core software and algorithms that make Companion Mode feel natural, responsive, and trustworthy. This means low-latency interaction, robust state handling, and production-grade observability—all running on a real robot, around real people.

In this role, you will:

• Ship real-time interaction features for Companion Mode (voice and multimodal HRI), where responsiveness and stability are product requirements, not optimizations.

• Build low-latency, full-duplex streaming pipelines (audio I/O, etc.) and the glue code that turns streaming signals into reliable robot behaviors.

• Implement and integrate core audio/HRI algorithms: echo cancellation, noise suppression, beamforming, turn-taking robustness.

• Engineer for home-grade reliability: instrumentation, telemetry, performance monitoring, and live debugging tools so the team sees issues before users do.

• Own the product edge of the stack, working with robotics, ML, and product teams to realize the Companion vision.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 3+ years building production real-time systems, ideally involving audio/video streaming, robotics middleware, or latency-critical consumer products.

• Have deep knowledge of real-time communication architectures: WebRTC, RTP/RTCP, low-latency audio pipelines, or embedded streaming systems.

• Write Python and/or C++ fluently and have shipped code on constrained hardware with strict timing requirements.

• Have strong opinions on reliability engineering: you've built systems that cannot fail silently and know how to design for graceful degradation.