Deep work.
Four days a week.
A small, fully remote team building hardware-grade AI for environments where mistakes cost more than money. This is how we work, and how we hire.
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 four focused build days a week, fully remote, collaborating synchronously over video — same hours, cameras on, high-bandwidth. The fifth day is Friday and it’s yours: spend it chasing down an experimental idea you’ve been sitting on — for the company, but with no metric on whether it works. A day to think. We don’t track hours. 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 tight, synchronous blocks Monday through Thursday — fully remote, cameras on, high-bandwidth. The best ideas come from working the problem in real time, not from async threads. We gather in person when it actually matters — field days, big builds, kickoffs — not on a fixed retreat calendar. Friday is “think day” — wherever you are — spent on an experimental thread, no metric, no review. Saturday is off. Always. Sunday is an optional 10am breakfast on the company — over video — no agenda, no phones, no “quick thing.”
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.Core hours 9am–7pm. The team shows whatever ran or didn’t over the weekend. We pick what gets attacked this week.
- Core hours 9am–7pm. Nobody clocks you in or out — the expectation is you’re present and reachable during them, cameras on when we’re building together.
- 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.Core hours 9am–7pm. Heads-down. Hardware time. Pair-programming when it helps. Optional 5pm critique.
- Core hours 9am–7pm. Same expectation as Monday — online, reachable, cameras on when we’re building together. The most interesting conversations happen at 9pm on a Wednesday when someone’s still on the call with a robot half-disassembled in frame.
- 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
Field day with the people we build for.
Once a quarter the whole company spends a day in the field. Riding along with a fire crew on a structure call. Range day with a SOF team. Shadowing an EMT shift through a night downtown. Touring a Stryker triage. We come back changed; the company gains a kind of domain context you cannot buy. It is the most important day on our calendar, and the reason the rest of the week makes sense.
Once a quarter the whole company spends a day in the field. Riding along with a fire crew on a structure call. Range day with a SOF team. Shadowing an EMT shift through a night downtown. Touring a Stryker triage. We come back changed; the company gains a kind of domain context you cannot buy. It is the most important day on our calendar, and the reason the rest of the week makes sense.
- 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.
- Hosting site picks the day, not us. If they say Tuesday at 0500, we’re at the apparatus bay at 0500.
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.