Senior Engineer (AI / Robotics / R&D), In-Home Care AI

SENIOR ENGINEER (AI / ROBOTICS / R&D), IN-HOME CARE AI

About Sierra Studio

When you apply to Sierra, you join an ecosystem. We specialize in connecting talented Brazilian professionals with exciting career opportunities in a highly-vetted small community of growing companies in the US. Applying to Sierra seamlessly integrates you into this ecosystem, granting automatic eligibility for all relevant opportunities we offer.

Location: Brazil, remote

Compensation: $100k – $150k base, DOE, plus equity

Reports to: CEO

About our hiring partner

Our hiring partner is a mission-driven technology startup transforming the way in-home care is delivered through innovative AI solutions. Their platform unifies signals from cameras, sensors, wearables, and connected devices to turn raw data into secure, real-time insights and closed-loop care actions; giving families peace of mind, seniors dignified independence, and providers the tools to deliver safer, more proactive care.

They are a small, mission-driven team tackling one of the most important challenges of our time: helping people age safely and independently at home. If that excites you, they'd love to have you join them.

About the Role

Our hiring partner is hiring their first in-house engineer.

They want someone who can open the codebase, test ideas themselves, and get them real answers fast. Someone they can hand an open question to and get back working evidence, not an opinion.

Most of your week will be spent writing code: prototypes, integrations, internal tools, and R&D experiments. The rest goes to being the technical reference inside the company, the person their engineering partner syncs with and the person their CEO turns to when something needs a real answer.

A big part of the job is technical validation. They're constantly running into questions like: can we run this on-device? Is this open source speaker stack good enough? What would it take for a humanoid robot to do something actually useful in a home? You build the answer, bring back your findings, and you and the team decide together what makes it into the product. Turning a question into working evidence in days instead of quarters is the single biggest thing this hire unlocks.

The role is remote from Brazil. You should be willing to travel to the US a couple of times a year to work hands-on with the team and the hardware, especially as their robotics work ramps up.

As the team grows, this role is expected to evolve into technical leadership, with the opportunity to hire and lead other engineers. They're looking for someone who is a strong senior individual contributor now and wants that next step.

What You'll Own

Building

Write production and prototype code across the stack. This is a hands-on role, not a supervisory one.

Stand up MVPs and working demos fast, then validate them with real data or real users before committing engineering budget to them.

Build the internal tools and lightweight automation that let a small team punch above its weight.

Ship integrations with the devices, sensors, and third-party services our hiring partner depends on.

R&D and Technical Validation

Take open technical questions (new models, new hardware, new open source components) and turn them into working evidence.

Run experiments end to end: scope them, build them, measure the results, write up what you found, and recommend a call.

Experiment with robotics hands-on. They expect four to five humanoids on site, and someone needs to be in the room with them. Robotics experience is a strong plus, but curiosity and speed matter more.

Evaluate build vs. buy vs. integrate decisions, and be able to defend the answer.

Being the Technical Voice in the Room

Answer day-to-day technical questions from the CEO and the business side directly and plainly, without a translation layer.

Give leadership honest reads on feasibility, effort, and risk, so roadmap conversations are grounded in reality.

Push back on scope creep and unre