Founding Robotics Engineer (Geometry)

Whistle Robotics is making automation accessible to every factory. Our mission is to help small and medium-sized manufacturers increase productivity, extend machine utilisation, and overcome labour shortages.

We do this by building intelligent, task-specific robots that can be deployed quickly and easily, starting with CNC machine tending.

Our team combines deep technical and commercial expertise. Our CEO, Pete, is a repeat founder who previously built and exited a venture-backed manufacturing company, while our CTO, Gio, has spent 15 years building software at the intersection of AI and advanced manufacturing (CloudNC and Autodesk). We are backed by leading investors in AI and robotics.

The role

As our Founding Geometry Software Engineer, you will build the engine that interprets CAD data and turns that into physical action. You will work at the edge of Computational Geometry and Physical Manufacturing developing algorithms that suggest robot grasping poses, evaluate quality of different workholding setups and automatically design the custom fingers and fixtures needed to hold a part.

What you will do

• CAD/CAM Integration: Build the pipeline to ingest and process industry-standard geometry formats (STEP, IGES, STL), extracting semantic meaning from data.
• Automated Tooling Design: Develop algorithms that procedurally generate custom gripper fingers and fixtures optimized for specific part geometries and clamping forces.
• Grasp Synthesis & Evaluation: Create the logic to suggest optimal part pick-up points, evaluating grasp quality based on stability, friction, and end-effector constraints.
• Surface Semantics: Build tools to automatically identify and annotate critical surfaces, such as holes, mating faces, or high-tolerance regions.
• Spatial Reasoning Engine: Implement high-performance collision detection, and geometry boolean operations for simulations.
• Computational Geometry Library: Own the core geometry stack — working across NURBS, meshes, voxel grids, point clouds to support our perception and manipulation teams.

Who you are

You are an engineer who loves building products that people actually use. You have a burning interest in robotics, 3D and computational geometry. You are looking to join an early team where you can make a difference.

• You are proficient in C++.
• You have deep experience working with libraries such as OpenCASCADE, libigl, Trimesh — or you have worked on game graphics engine internals.
• You are comfortable with basic computational geometry, including vector math, quaternions, transformation matrices, and dot/cross products.
• You have experience with spatial indexing, minkowski sums, convex hulls, and boolean operations on complex solids.
• You don’t need to be a roboticist, but you should be excited to work with physical hardware.

A Note on "Experience"

Research shows that exceptional people from underrepresented groups often only apply to jobs if they meet 100% of the criteria. If you are a brilliant engineer who loves building things, but you don't check every single box above, please apply anyway. We value talent, grit, and the ability to learn over a perfect resume.

• Ground-floor opportunity: Be part of our founding team. You will have a significant equity stake and a direct influence on the company’s trajectory.
• Real-world meaning and impact: We are deploying robots today. Your work will enable small local businesses to adopt Physical AI and drive the reshoring of production.
• World-class team: Work directly with founders who have been there and done it, in both manufacturing and deep-tech AI.
• The lab: A well-equipped workspace in London where you have the tools, resources, and autonomy to build.

Our values

We are a small, high-velocity team. We look for people who resonate with:

• Driven by curiosity: You aren't afraid to dive into a problem outside your core discipline. You approach every problem with humility and a strong desire to learn.
• Focused and incremental: You ship high-quality products fast. You achieve that, not by working extra hours, but by working methodically, incrementally, constantly testing your own assumptions and focusing on the right things. Building a meaningful business is a marathon, not a sprint.
• Extreme ownership: You don't wait for a ticket to be assigned. You see a gap in the product? You design a solution and you implement it.
• Greater than the sum of parts: You amplify everyone around you. We are building something that matters, and we can’t do that alone. We work hard, in person, because the best engineering happens when the team is at the whiteboard (or the workbench) together.