Technical Co-Founder / CTO — Stealth Robotics Startup

Location: Toronto / GTA preferred

Stage: Pre-Seed

Role: Technical Co-Founder & CTO

Focus: Vision-Language-Action Models, Robot Learning & Manipulation

About the Company

We are an early-stage robotics startup building physical AI systems for real-world commercial environments.

We are starting with a high-frequency, labour-intensive manipulation workflow where recent advances in robot foundation models and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have created an opportunity to automate tasks that historically have been difficult for conventional robotics.

We have completed significant customer discovery, are actively working with prospective design partners, and are preparing for our first real-world deployments.

We are looking for a deeply technical co-founder to own the robotics stack and help build the company from the ground up.

The Role

We’re looking for a Technical Co-Founder / CTO with deep interest and experience in modern robot learning.

You should closely follow advances in Vision-Language-Action models, imitation learning, diffusion policies, reinforcement learning, and generalist robot policies, including research coming from teams such as Physical Intelligence, NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, Stanford, Berkeley, Toyota Research Institute, and other leading robotics labs.

But this is not a research-only role.

We need someone who can translate frontier research into robots that reliably perform manipulation tasks in real customer environments.

You will own the technical roadmap from data collection and model training through hardware integration and field deployment.

What You'll Own

- Own the company's robotics and embodied-AI technical strategy.
- Build, fine-tune, and deploy VLA and robot-learning policies for complex manipulation tasks.
- Develop imitation-learning and teleoperation pipelines for collecting high-quality demonstrations.
- Evaluate and adapt state-of-the-art robot foundation models rather than unnecessarily building everything from scratch.
- Build systems capable of handling significant variation in objects, configurations, environments, and operating conditions.
- Develop the perception, manipulation, control, inference, and deployment stack.
- Design evaluation infrastructure around task success rate, cycle time,



intervention rate, failure recovery, and reliability.
- Build systems for detecting and recovering from failures and escalating to human teleoperation when appropriate.
- Make technical decisions across robotic arms, end effectors, cameras, sensors, compute, and supporting hardware.
- Use simulation and synthetic data where they meaningfully accelerate real-world learning.
- Personally deploy and debug robots in customer environments.
- Continuously evaluate new robotics research and rapidly incorporate advances that improve the product.
- Recruit and eventually lead the company's robotics and engineering organization.

What We're Looking For

Strong experience in several of the following:
- Vision-Language-Action models
- Robot foundation models
- Imitation learning / behavior cloning
- Diffusion policies
- Reinforcement learning
- Robotic manipulation
- Computer vision
- Teleoperation and demonstration collection
- PyTorch
- ROS / ROS 2
- NVIDIA Isaac Sim / Isaac Lab
- Real-time robot control
- Sim-to-real
- Real-world learned-policy deployment

Familiarity with approaches such as π0 / π0.5 / π0.6, NVIDIA GR00T, OpenVLA, RT-1/RT-2, ACT, Diffusion Policy, or related architectures is particularly relevant. What Matters More Than Credentials

We care much more about what you can build than where you went to school.

You might be a robotics researcher, ML engineer, roboticist, graduate student, or unusually strong self-taught engineer.

The ideal person can move rapidly through:

paper → code → robot → deployment → failure → iteration

You aren't satisfied because a policy worked in a carefully controlled demonstration. You want to know whether it will continue working hundreds or thousands of cycles later in a customer's facility.





You understand that getting a manipulation system from 0% to 80% success and getting it from 80% to production-grade reliability are fundamentally different engineering challenges.

Your First Mission

Take a complex, deformable-object manipulation task from prototype to real-world deployment.

You'll be responsible for building the data, training, inference, perception, control, and recovery systems necessary to make the task work reliably outside of the lab.

Success isn't a compelling demo.

Success is a customer paying for a robot because it reliably performs useful work.

Who You Are

We're looking for someone who:

- Is obsessed with robotics and embodied intelligence.
- Keeps up with frontier robotics research without being asked.
- Can distinguish an interesting research result from something practical in production.
- Moves quickly from papers and ideas to experiments on real hardware.
- Enjoys debugging the gap between what should work and what actually works.
- Thinks about reliability, latency, hardware, economics, maintainability, and customer workflows alongside model performance.
- Wants substantial ownership over the technology and company.
- Is excited by the uncertainty and responsibility of building a venture-backed robotics company from its earliest stage.

Compensation and Benefits

- Meaningful founder equity with substantial ownership in the company.
- This is a co-founder role, not a salaried employee position at the current stage.
- Cash compensation is expected to begin following a successful venture financing.
- Significant ownership and autonomy over the company's technical direction.
- Opportunity to build the robotics stack from the ground up.
- Opportunity to recruit and lead the future engineering organization.
- Direct involvement in customer deployments and company strategy.
- The potential long-term upside and responsibility that comes with being an early founder of a venture-backed robotics company.

Important

This is a genuine co-founder opportunity.

We're not looking for someone to contribute a few hours on the side indefinitely. We're looking for someone who, after an initial period of determining mutual fit, is prepared to make a serious commitment to building the company.

If you're excited about taking state-of-the-art robot learning out of the lab and turning it into a commercially deployed product, we'd like to hear from you.

📌 Technical Co-founder (New Grad) (Robotics)
🏢 Stealth Startup
📍 Toronto