Platform Engineer

📍Location: Zurich

📅 Start Date: ASAP

⌛Employment: Full-time

At Bubble Robotics, we’re building the autonomous workforce for the ocean.

The 21st century will be decided offshore - from energy resilience and climate stability to national defense. Yet the ocean remains the least observed, least automated, and least understood environment on Earth.

Our constellation of small, resident robots lives at sea—inspecting offshore infrastructure, monitoring ecosystems, and securing critical assets continuously—without costly vessels or divers. They accelerate our understanding of the ocean and unlock the $3 trillion blue economy.

We’ve just closed a multi-million dollar pre-seed round, secured $5M+ in LOIs from top offshore energy operators, and are backed by leading VCs and ocean strategics. Our team includes alumni from NASA JPL, ETH Zurich and the world’s top robotics and climate labs.

We're looking for a Platform Engineer who thrives on building reliable backend and communication systems. If your background is in streaming/video transport, networking, industrial IoT, defense‑grade systems, real‑time communication platforms, or backend‑heavy SaaS, you’ll immediately recognize the challenges and impact of this role.

You’ll design and own the services that move live video, real‑time telemetry, and control signals between our edge devices and remote operators. This means building systems that stay responsive over unstable links, adapt to fluctuating bandwidth, and continue delivering mission‑critical data even when conditions are far from ideal.

Your work becomes the backbone of remote operation: resilient APIs, adaptive data pipelines, and a secure, performance‑focused network architecture that keeps operators connected, informed, and in control. If you enjoy building distributed systems that must work reliably under pressure — and you want your engineering to matter in the real world — we want you on this team.

• Back-end Architecture & API Ownership (70%)Design, implement, and maintain the core backend services that orchestrate robot control, telemetry, and supervision
• Build robust APIs that serve as the foundation for teleoperation, monitoring, and future autonomy modules
• Develop resilient data and video pipelines that adapt to unstable or low‑bandwidth connections
• Ensure backend systems scale cleanly across multiple products, deployments, and operators
• Network Architecture & Communication Systems (20%)Architect secure, low‑latency communication channels between field devices and the control center
• Design network topologies that support multi‑stream video, telemetry, and command channels simultaneously
• Implement secure tunneling (WireGuard, IPSec, etc.), NAT traversal strategies, and bandwidth‑adaptive routing
• Ensure reliability under degraded or intermittent connectivity
• DevOps & Operational Reliability (10%)Maintain CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows for backend and communication services
• Implement observability: logging, metrics, alerting, and health monitoring across distributed systems
• Contribute to infrastructure automation and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, Nomad, etc.)

Technical

• 3+ years of experience in backend software engineering building production systems
• Strong backend fundamentals — API design, distributed systems, data flow, reliability
• Experience building systems that interact with hardware or edge devices (IoT, streaming, sensors, gateways, etc.)
• Good engineering judgment around reliability, failure modes, degraded connectivity, and long‑term maintainability
• API design for real‑time or device‑connected systems (telemetry, control, streaming, etc.)
• Fluent in Python; solid experience with C++ or another systems language; JavaScript a plus
• Hands‑on experience with Docker and containerized deployments
• Strong understanding of server architecture — services, messaging, scaling, observability
• Networking fundamentals — protocols, routing, NAT traversal, secure tunnels, bandwidth adaptation
• Ability to work independently and take ownership of open‑ended, cross‑disciplinary problems

Bonus

• Experience with video or sensor data streaming
• Exposure to teleoperation, real‑time communication systems, or autonomy pipelines
• Experience with maritime, industrial, or remote‑operations environments

Languages

• English mandatory
• French and/or German a strong plus.

• Small team, fast pace, high ownership.
• We expect people to manage their work independently.
• We communicate openly about problems and challenges.
• We make pragmatic decisions and focus on execution.
• Transparency matters more to us than optics.

• Build what no one else dares: persistent underwater autonomy by bringing spacetech to the ocean.
• Join a world-class team with deep robotics and aerospace backgrounds.
• Ship fast: From prototype to ocean in weeks, not years.
• Equity and impact: Be part of a deep-tech company unlocking the $1T+ blue economy
• Work on meaningful applications, from offshore wind to biodiversity monitoring and defense
• Competitive salary and equity package
• Small team, heavy ownership

Apply via our Notion Page. All applications are reviewed through the portal only; individual outreach can’t be responded to.