Founding Ground Robotics Engineer

This role requires US citizenship. Due to the nature of our work at the intersection of critical minerals and national security-relevant autonomous systems, we are only able to consider US citizens at this time.

As Pluton's Founding Ground Robotics Engineer, you will design and deploy the ground systems responsible for autonomous terrain navigation and geological data collection. You will build robotic platforms capable of traversing remote, unstructured environments, integrate sensing payloads for close-range geological intelligence, and develop the autonomy systems that allow ground robots to execute validation missions with minimal human intervention. You will work directly with the founders and the robotics team — including our aerial and simulation engineers — to build the ground pillar of Pluton's exploration platform. This is a founding role with significant influence over how the system is architected.

Pluton's ground systems are the validation layer of the exploration stack. After the aerial platform and NOUS identify a target, ground robots are deployed to navigate to it, collect structured geological data, and feed that intelligence back into the exploration engine. These systems must operate in environments characterized by remote terrain, no infrastructure, steep or unstable ground, and large distances from human operators. Your work will define how Pluton physically interacts with the geological landscape.

• Design and deploy Pluton's ground exploration platform — selecting and modifying ground robot hardware, optimizing mobility and range for remote terrain operations, integrating compute and sensing payloads, and ensuring reliability in rugged field environments.

• Develop autonomous navigation capabilities enabling ground systems to traverse unstructured terrain, execute waypoint missions generated by NOUS, avoid obstacles, and adapt to dynamic terrain conditions with minimal teleoperation.
• Integrate navigation systems with Pluton's exploration engine to enable closed-loop ground missions.

• Integrate close-range sensing technologies used for geological validation — including hyperspectral and multispectral imaging, LiDAR and structured light for terrain mapping, geophysical sensors for subsurface signals, and RGB systems for visual documentation.
• Generate the ground-truth datasets that validate aerial detections and guide drilling decisions.

• Work with Pluton's simulation engineer to validate ground missions in simulation prior to field deployment.
• Contribute platform-specific models, terrain interaction data, and mission profiles to the shared simulation environment.

• Lead real-world testing and deployment of ground systems, including field navigation testing, mission validation, and iterating on platform performance based on results in the field.

Candidates may come from backgrounds such as autonomy startups, defense ground robotics, field robotics research, mining or resource-sector robotics, or agricultural / inspection robotics. A strong passion for working on problems that matter at a national and civilizational scale is as important as technical depth.

This is a founding role at an early-stage company. Compensation is equity-based until our next funding round, which we are actively closing. Upon funding, the role transitions to a full salary and equity package commensurate with a senior founding engineer. Candidates must be US citizens. This requirement is non-negotiable and is tied to the nature of our technology and the industries we operate in.

Critical minerals underpin the supply chains of modern civilization. Copper, lithium, rare earth elements, and other strategic materials power energy infrastructure, electric transportation, advanced manufacturing, and computing systems. Yet discovering new mineral deposits remains slow and uncertain. Pluton is building a system that can autonomously find, validate, and guide the extraction of these minerals at a speed and scale the industry has never seen. The ground robot is the system's hands — the thing that physically reaches the deposit and confirms it's real. The engineer who builds it closes the loop between aerial intelligence and drilling action.