Head of Robotics

About Leptex

Leptex is building personal intelligence for everyday people. Our mission is to democratize AI: make it something everyone can use, understand, and control. Each person should decide how their data is used, what their AI can do, and which decisions remain theirs. We start with farmers and independent business owners, building alongside them and learning from their daily work. Join us to bring that power to more people.

About the role

As Head of Robotics, you will lead robotics development at Leptex, starting with robotic harvesting for farms. You will work with the founder to choose which problems to solve, set the technical direction, and take responsibility for building and testing working machines. You will write code, integrate hardware, run experiments, and work directly with farmers.

Our Master Plan, Part Two explores how personal intelligence could connect confirmed demand with reliable physical work. Robotics is a future area of exploration, and you will help test that vision by building and evaluating useful systems, one task at a time. You will decide what we should build and where specialist partners can help. A successful system must fit a farmer's crops, working conditions, and budget, and keep the farmer in control of their data and equipment.

This is a full-time role based in the United States. Software work can be remote, with hands-on work required at prototype facilities and farm trial sites. You can demonstrate your abilities through research, university teams, personal projects, or industry experience. What matters is what you have built, what you learned from real machines, and your ability to take responsibility for the next stage.

Compensation: Cash compensation and any equity arrangements have not yet been determined. Compensation, any applicable benefits, and any equity grant and vesting terms will be agreed in writing by both parties before work begins.

What you'll do

• Set the robotics direction: Work with farmers to choose an initial crop, task, and operating environment. Define useful milestones and success criteria, prioritize the work, and decide when evidence supports expanding, changing, or stopping an approach.
• Design and integrate the system: Bring together robot arms, grippers, cameras, sensors, computing, and control software. Compare available equipment and specialist partners, build what is missing, and make the components work together as a maintainable system.
• Develop perception: Build and evaluate methods to locate fruit, assess picking readiness, and understand nearby obstacles. Test how lighting, foliage, occlusion, and variation between plants affect the system’s decisions in real conditions.
• Build harvesting capabilities: Develop grasping, motion planning, and control for approaching, picking, and placing fruit. Test end effectors and handling methods, measure damage and failed attempts, and improve performance through repeatable experiments.
• Connect AI to bounded tasks: Integrate robotic workflows with personal intelligence and confirmed fulfillment needs. Separate an order or payment from permission to operate equipment, validate each task’s scope, and report completed work and exceptions clearly.
• Build and test prototypes: Write and debug robot software, bring up hardware, and move from simulation or bench tests to controlled physical trials. Use AI tools to accelerate development while checking generated code and behavior on the actual system.
• Keep operators in control: Design understandable task approval, operating limits, stop controls, and human handoffs. Keep equipment safety controls independent of language-model output, test failure cases, and give farmers clear choices about data collection and use.
• Run farm trials: Plan limited trials with farmers and work on site to observe results. Track task completion, fruit quality, speed, downtime, and human intervention, then use that evidence to improve the next iteration.
• Make the economics work: Evaluate equipment, installation, maintenance, support, and operating costs against the value of the task. Design for the resources and technical confidence of ordinary farm operators, and avoid complexity that they cannot sustain.
• Build the robotics function: Own the roadmap, budget priorities, documentation, and technical decisions with the founder. Establish useful research and equipment partnerships, help build the team as needs become clear, and stay directly involved in delivery.

What we're looking for

• Exceptional learning ability: You quickly learn unfamiliar robotics techniques, AI capabilities, tools, and agricultural workflows. You read research critically, reproduce useful results, test assumptions, and turn new knowledge into working systems.
• Experience with real robots: You have built or substantially contributed to a physical robot and can explain your own work, experiments, and failures. Experience with harvesting, grasping, manipulation, or agricultural automation is especially relevant.
• Systems engineering: You understand how mechanical design, electronics, sensors, computing, and software affect one another. You can diagnose problems across these areas, choose practical components, and recognize when deeper expertise is needed.
• Perception and manipulation: You have substantial practical experience in at least one of computer vision, robotic manipulation, or control, and can integrate that work into a complete robot. You can explain how you evaluate performance and handle uncertainty beyond a prepared demonstration.
• Programming and AI tools: You can write, understand, and debug code in languages such as Python or C++, work with robotics tools such as ROS, and use AI coding tools effectively. You check their output and learn the tools the work requires.
• Hands-on development: You are comfortable assembling and calibrating equipment, integrating components, collecting measurements, and troubleshooting on site. You can develop a prototype with a clearly defined scope using limited resources and carry it through repeated physical tests.
• Evaluation and safety judgment: You can design useful experiments, recognize the limits of simulation, and investigate failures using evidence. You understand why operating limits, stop controls, and human intervention must remain reliable when an AI component makes a mistake.
• Practical product judgment: You listen to farmers and understand seasonal work, crop quality, maintenance, and cost. You can choose a focused problem worth solving, distinguish a demonstration from a useful product, and revise your plans when field results challenge your assumptions.
• Leadership and mission: You are ready to help build a company, make difficult trade-offs, communicate clearly, and remain accountable for delivery. You share our commitment to personal AI sovereignty: ordinary people must retain control of their data, equipment, and important decisions.
• Education: No degree or field of study is required. We welcome people from every discipline. University research, student teams, independent work, open-source projects, and industry experience can all demonstrate your ability to learn, use AI tools, and build working robots.

Equal opportunity

Leptex is an equal opportunity employer. We base hiring decisions on job-related skills and qualifications. We do not discriminate against applicants or employees based on race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process, write to careers@leptex.com.

We do not use AI to screen or assess applicants. A person reads every application. We use application materials to assess your suitability for a role, communicate with you about recruitment, and meet applicable legal and recordkeeping obligations. We retain them only for as long as needed for these purposes, including any required retention period or legal hold, and then delete them. For questions or requests about your application data, contact privacy@leptex.com.