Robotics Software Engineer

What're we trying to solve? Openshelf is building an open-source system to automate physical inventory—combining hardware and software to handle storage, retrieval, and real-time tracking.

• The Problem: Managing physical inventory is messy. Manual processes are slow, error-prone, and don't scale. It's hard to know what you have, where it is, or how much space it's taking up. • What We're Doing: We're developing a small-scale AS/RS system that captures weight, dimensions, and location data every time something moves. Our stack runs Python on the backend (FastAPI, hardware orchestration, event-driven robot control) and a SvelteKit frontend, all containerized and deployed on dedicated hardware. We're designing it to be flexible and open so others can adapt, improve, and deploy it across all kinds of environments—not just warehouses with big budgets. The goal is accurate, real-time visibility into physical inventory, made as accessible as possible.

What you'll be doing:

• Maintaining, debugging, and improving the existing Python backend and hardware control layer under the guidance of senior engineers. • Writing clean, testable Python code that interfaces with physical hardware (motors, scales, barcode scanners, sensors) over serial, Modbus, and GPIO. • Building and maintaining internal tools and dashboards that let the team monitor, configure, and debug production devices. • Working with AI coding agents to accelerate development—we already use them daily and expect you to…