What to Expect

Dawn Industries builds software that watches industrial robot cells (PLC, robot, gripper, sensors), diagnoses faults with evidence an engineer can verify, and applies a fix only when a human approves it. You will own the live data plane: the part of the product that holds a standing connection to running industrial controllers, reads from them safely, and serves that data to everything downstream. What you build will eventually run inside customers' plants, attached to machines we do not own and must never disturb.

We develop against real hardware in our own lab.

APPLICATION NOTE: No PLC, robotics, or manufacturing experience is required. Learning to read industrial programs deeply is part of the job.

What You'll Do

• Protocol Engineering: Implement and harden clients for native industrial protocols (S7comm/ISO-on-TCP, Modbus RTU/TCP, EtherNet/IP/CIP, PROFINET, OPC UA, MELSEC/SLMP), from the spec where one exists and from packet captures where one does not.
• Surface Characterization: Empirically map what each controller family actually exposes: addressing modes, per-request cost, throughput ceilings, undocumented limits, and how it fails. Publish the numbers and design against them.
• Acquisition Scheduling: Build read planners and schedulers that extract the most information per round-trip within measured device budgets, so monitoring never degrades a running machine.
• Read-Only Guarantees: Enforce at the protocol layer that the acquisition path cannot mutate a controller, and make that guarantee provable, tested, and auditable.

What You'll Bring

• Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 1+ years of systems software engineering, or a portfolio that proves the same depth.
• Expert-level C or Python, including comfort at the byte level: struct layouts, endianness, checksums, framing.
• Strong socket-level network programming: protocol state machines, timeouts, reconnection, backpressure.
• Proven protocol reverse-engineering you can walk us through: something you decoded from packet captures.
• Not required: PLC, robotics, or manufacturing experience. Learning to read industrial programs deeply is part of the job.

Nice to Have

• You have built or maintained a feed handler or gateway against a venue's native binary protocol, where latency is measured and a malformed message is unacceptable.
• You have written a protocol dissector, or landed a patch in one.
• You have made an undocumented device speak: a smart-home gadget, a vehicle bus, lab equipment, a radio signal.
• You have written or debugged a device driver.
• Exposure to OT networks or ICS/SCADA from any side, including security research.
• Serial fieldbus experience (RS-485, Modbus RTU) or other electrical transports.

About the company

Dawn Industries

We're giving the world's factories one language for every robot they own.

Walk into any modern factory and you'll find something strange. The robots that weld your car, assemble your dishwasher, and lift things no human should lift are marvels of engineering, and they're still programmed like it's 1995. An engineer stands beside a two-ton arm holding a teach pendant, nudging it point by point, usually on a weekend, because that's the only time the line can afford to stop. Every robot brand speaks its own language. None of their tools talk to each other. The machines that build the physical world run on workflows nobody has seriously challenged in thirty years.

We think that's absurd. We're fixing it.

What we do

Dawn Industries builds VIM, the platform where robots from every vendor finally live in one workspace: programmed with the help of AI, tested in simulation before anything touches the floor, and kept in sync with reality for the entire life of the production line. VIM is the only software that can deploy and manage industrial robots 10x faster and cheaper.

The prize is enormous. Manufacturing is a multi-trillion-dollar slice of the global economy running on the least modern software stack in tech. Whoever rebuilds that layer changes how everything gets made. We intend to be that company.

Who we are

We're a small, founder-led team backed by Y Combinator. Our founders came to this problem obsessed with a simple observation: the hardest problems in robotics aren't in the lab anymore, they're on the factory floor, and almost nobody in software is paying attention. We spend as much time in plants talking to the engineers who keep production lines alive as we do writing code, and it shows in everything we build.

What it's like here

You'll work closely with the founders with real ownership over real problems. You'll talk to the people who actually run factories, and you'll watch your work land on production floors where the stakes are physical and the feedback is immediate.

If you are ready to push the frontier of AI in the physical world, come build with us.