In my years working as a robotics recruiter, I have watched brilliant engineers join the right company at the right time and change their careers in a single year. I have also watched great people walk into roles that looked great in the interview loop but hid a thin runway, a brittle codebase, or a culture that burned through staff. A job offer in robotics is exciting. It is also a decision that deserves calm due diligence. Here is how I advise candidates to evaluate a company before they say yes, based on what I see every week from the hiring side of the table.
What I Look For First When a Robotics Offer Hits Your Inbox
When a candidate sends me an offer to review, I start with a short checklist. I want to know whether the company can survive the next twelve to twenty four months, whether the product is real enough to withstand customer chaos, and whether the team behaves like adults when things break.
Those three ideas translate into practical questions. Ask about funding and cash burn so you can infer runway. Ask how they ship and support software and hardware so you can judge technical maturity. Ask how they run safety reviews and incident response so you can sense the culture. I also pay attention to how quickly leaders answer basic questions. If executives dodge simple funding or roadmap questions, that is a red flag. Conversely, if managers light up when they talk about customers and can explain their support model, that’s a positive sign. Your goal is to collect enough proof to feel confident that you will do good work, learn, and be paid on time.
Funding Status and Runway: The Boring Questions That Protect Your Future
Runway tells you how long the company can operate at its current spending rate. You don’t need a finance background to ask smart questions. Request the month of the most recent round, the amount raised, current burn, and the plan to reach the next milestone. A simple calculation divides cash by monthly burn to estimate months of runway. Investors and operators often target eighteen to twenty four months for early growth, and in tighter markets some advisors suggest that teams plan for twenty four to thirty six months so they can ride out slow fundraising cycles. You are not prying. You are doing your part to avoid surprises that force a job search in a bad season. Resources that explain this clearly include practical primers on cash runway and bank guidance that frames a conservative range for uncertain markets.
Don’t stop at the number. Ask how sensitive that number is to hiring plans or delayed revenue. If a company is hiring twenty engineers and opening a second site, burn will jump. If procurement cycles slip in their target industry, collections move. Ask what happens if a customer pushes a large order by a quarter. Strong leaders will have a plan for that scenario. We place people at both venture-backed firms and profitable bootstrapped companies. Each can be healthy. The difference is how honest leadership is about cash and what path gets them to positive margins. Listen for specifics rather than slogans.
Tech Stack and Product Maturity: Look Past Shiny Demos
Robotics teams vary widely in their stacks, but patterns repeat. For manipulation work, teams often build on ROS 2 with MoveIt for motion planning. For mobile platforms, you will hear about ROS 2 nodes that handle perception, localization, and planning, and you will see Gazebo or higher fidelity simulators in their toolchain. When you interview, ask to walk through a recent feature from design to deployment. Ask where simulation lives in the process. Ask how they log, bag, and replay issues from the field. If the role touches manipulation, ask how they structure MoveIt scenes and planners. The public documentation is a good anchor for your questions and will help you translate their answers into a mental model you can trust.
One practical example from a recent search: a candidate asked a hiring panel how they decided when to graduate a controller from simulation to a gated field trial. The team described a checklist that covered unit tests, sim-in-the-loop runs, and an operator training step. They also showed a simple rollback procedure. That answer signaled that the stack was not only modern, it was disciplined. Contrast that with teams that rely on heroic late nights. You want repeatable process, not recurring drama.
Growth Trajectory and Customer Reality: Signs You Can Trust
Every company claims growth. You want proof of real customer traction. Ask how many active deployments they support, how often those deployments require on-site work, and how many units are shipping quarterly. Industry context helps you interpret answers. The International Federation of Robotics reports that global industrial robot installations remain very large in absolute terms, even as year to year swings occur, and that adoption dynamics vary by region and sector. Knowing the baseline helps you separate a company that is riding a healthy wave from one that is fighting a headwind in a narrow niche. You can sample the public executive summary or reputable summaries that break down where installations are concentrated by country and sector.
When I check references on a company, I like to call a customer success manager or a field service lead, not just a founder. Those folks will tell you how many tickets are open on a typical week and what breaks on Friday afternoons. If the company will not let you talk to anyone close to customers, take note. Healthy teams are proud of the people who keep customers happy and will put them on your interview loop.
Safety, Compliance, and Reliability: Culture You Can Feel
Whether you write C++ for planners or design fixtures, your work will live near people. You deserve to know how the company treats safety. For industrial arms, the foundational standard is ISO 10218, which sets requirements for safe design and integration. For industrial mobile robots, the ANSI or A3 R15.08 series and ISO 3691-4 define expectations for mobile platforms in shared spaces. You do not need to memorize clause numbers. You do want to hear leaders describe how those references shape their risk assessments and validation steps. Reputable overviews are available from standards bodies and industry groups, and they help you build the vocabulary to ask better questions.
I often ask teams to describe a recent safety review and what changed as a result. A strong answer sounds like this: “we identified a new pinch risk during a layout change, updated guarding, adjusted a stop category, and trained operators before restart.” A weak answer sounds like this: “safety is important here and we follow best practices.” You are listening for a real process that has teeth, not a slogan. If the role is field heavy, ask how they handle incident response and whether service staff have authority to pause a deployment when conditions drift from the specified operating environment. That detail reveals whether safety is supported by leadership or left to the bravest person on shift.
Team Habits and Culture Indicators That Predict Your Day to Day
Culture is not free snacks. It is the sum of habits you will live with. Ask how the team writes and reviews code. Ask whether design docs are expected and who reads them. Ask how often engineers visit customer sites and who carries the pager for on-call. Pay attention to how people talk about other functions. If software blames hardware in every answer, or if field service is described as a dumping ground, you are hearing the edges of future friction. I like to ask for examples of the last bug that reached a customer and how the team handled it. Healthy teams will tell you who diagnosed it, how they tested the fix, and what they changed in process to avoid it next time. Unhealthy teams will blame a former employee or shrug. You can learn more from those stories than from a thousand words about values.
One small tell from my own notes. During an onsite at an AMR vendor, a candidate quietly watched how operators interacted with robots in the test bay. When no one was looking, he asked a technician which logs they cared about most and how often those logs were actually reviewed. The tech answered with specifics. That candidate accepted the offer. He still works there and still asks technicians first. Good culture survives contact with the day to day. It does not live only in a slide deck.
Career Development and Learning: What Grows Here and How Fast
Robotics careers reward people who learn across boundaries. You will write better code if you understand a torque curve. You will design better fixtures if you understand how the planner thinks. Ask about mentorship. Ask whether senior engineers do regular design or log reviews with juniors. Ask how promotions work and whether the company publishes expectations by level. If the company supports training, ask what that looks like in practice. Do they budget for conferences or certifications? Do they set aside time for learning or do they expect nights and weekends? I also ask leaders to describe a person who grew quickly in the last year and what made that possible. The answers reveal whether career development is a habit or a hope.
It helps to test the learning culture with a practical request. Suggest a small starter project you could tackle in your first month and ask how they would support it. For example, propose adding MoveIt scene validation to catch common collision model errors during bring-up, or adding a brief operator checklist to the pilot plan. If a manager engages and sketches how to measure impact, you are likely looking at a place where people get better. If they sigh and say there is no time for that, you just learned something too.
Offer Structure and Equity 101: Read the Details Before You Dream
Base and bonus are straightforward. Equity needs care. Ask what type of options you are receiving, how vesting works, and what happens at exercise. In the United States, companies often grant incentive stock options, which are a statutory category with specific tax treatment, or nonstatutory options. The IRS maintains clear descriptions of these categories and publishes related forms and guidance. A simple way to ground your questions is to skim the IRS topic page on stock options and the form used when an ISO is exercised. The SEC’s investor materials explain basic concepts as well. These sources will help you translate offer letters and plan summaries.
If the company is public or plans to file, equity plans and registrations appear in filings. You may see references to Form S-8 for employee stock plans. That is a public company concept, but it is a useful signal that equity follows rules and requires disclosure. For private companies, you are relying on board-approved plans and your grant paperwork. Ask for a plain-language summary of your vesting schedule, acceleration terms, and exercise windows. If you are moving for the role, ask whether the company offers cash bonuses at milestones so you are not forced to exercise early. Read slowly and ask for examples.
Reference Checks You Run on the Company
Candidates often forget that reference checks go both ways. Beyond the official interviews, you can learn a lot from brief, polite conversations with people who have touched the product. Ask a former employee what they would fix first if they returned. Ask a partner what the company is like at month six of a deployment. If you cannot reach those folks, look for third-party context that frames the market. Industry groups publish data that can help you sense where demand is strong. The International Federation of Robotics updates global installation figures and regional density trends, which puts company claims in context even if the numbers are not a direct proxy for a small niche. It is a compass you can trust more than marketing slides.
I also check how teams talk about safety in public. Do they publish case studies that mention risk assessment? Do they reference standards by name in job descriptions? Do they speak at events where integrators and safety professionals gather? A company that treats safety as a first class topic is usually serious about reliability and customer trust. You do not need them to be perfect. You do want them to be accountable.
A Few Targeted Questions You Can Ask Without Being Awkward
Use questions that invite specific stories rather than yes or no answers. You can keep it friendly and still get signal.
- What changed in your process after the last major incident that reached a customer site?
- How many months of runway do you have at the current burn, and what plan extends that if revenue slips a quarter?
- Can you walk me through a recent feature from design doc to deployment, including simulation and rollback?
- How does the team apply standards like ISO 10218 or R15.08 in risk assessments for current products?
- Who mentored the last engineer who got promoted, and what did that mentorship look like in practice?
Good leaders will answer these with examples. That is what you want. You are not looking for the perfect answer. You are looking for a consistent pattern of thoughtful behavior.
One Last Filter Before You Say Yes
After you ask the funding questions, look at the tech stack, and listen for culture, pause. Picture a hard week at this company. A customer calls about a regression. A part is late. A demo for the board is tomorrow morning. Do the people you met handle that week with clarity and care? Do they give each other helpful information instead of blame? Do they have logs and tests that shrink the problem? Do leaders make decisions that trade speed and safety in a way you respect? If your gut says yes, you are probably headed to a place where you will grow and ship meaningful work. If your gut hesitates, listen. You can pass with respect. Another offer will come, and your future self will be glad you waited for the right fit.
