Mechatronics & hardware
A food-safe arm and end-effector, one-station footprint, built for wet, cold, sanitary environments.
Merista is a founding team building a physical AI workforce for food production — operated robots that do the repetitive, hygiene-critical work on the lines that make the developed world's food. We are selecting design-partner factories in Europe now. This is early: the robot, the operations layer, and the data flywheel are being built by the people we hire this year.
Founded by the team that built and operated food robots in live, customer-facing service at REMY Robotics — years of real uptime, recovery, and QA discipline, not a demo. That operating record is what you'd be building on.
The full operating record lives on the technology page. See the full record →
The work is full-stack physical AI: hardware that survives washdown, perception that survives risotto, and an operations layer that keeps robots healthy on customer floors. This year, the areas we're hiring into:
A food-safe arm and end-effector, one-station footprint, built for wet, cold, sanitary environments.
Weight-guided deposits to target every tray, at roughly a six-second cycle — a target, not achieved commercial performance.
Perception on deformable ingredients, and the capture-and-curation flywheel: turning real failures and recoveries into grounded supervision that makes the fleet more reliable.
The operations layer: monitoring, remote recovery, QA logging, updates pushed to deployed robots.
Site prep to production, cleaning validated with the customer's QA, safety and CE conformity built in.
Running the robot for the factory, because we operate what we deploy.
Robotics & control and mechatronics & hardware have vacancies open now. For the other areas, write to us — hello@merista.ai — and tell us what you'd want to own.
Both are founding-team hires reporting to the CTO, full-time and on-site in Barcelona, with hands-on robot work and factory visits. You don't need food-industry experience. Show us something you built, what broke, and how you improved it.
Own the robot's mind: everything between intent and motion. Food changes shape, sticks to tools, and behaves differently as containers empty. You'll make perception, manipulation, and control hit portion weight at line pace, and recover when a transfer fails.
You'd ownOwn the robot's body: one we can build repeatedly, clean, maintain, and run on a factory floor. Fragile and sticky ingredients, a mobile base that isn't bolted down, and cold, wet rooms where cleaning is part of every day.
You'd ownWe're a small, senior team: headquarters in London, engineering in Barcelona. Small enough that what you build ships and gets operated, not shelved. The robot is designed down, not up — one task family, a one-station footprint, no mobility stack — and that subtraction is the culture: reliability comes from what we refuse to build. There's no bureaucracy because there's no room for it, and no theatre: no over-reporting, no roadmap cosplay, no demos we can't operate. What we ask for is judgment and ownership.
The offer is ownership of a hard problem, senior people to build it with, and being in the room in Barcelona while the first robots reach real lines.