Joshua Kiff

United Kingdom

Joshua Kiff

Robotics & Mechatronics Engineer

I take machines from CAD to certified, deployed product: mechanical design, embedded control, and the production software that runs them.

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VARK wheel-module prototype

Featured work

2025 – presentSystems architecture

VARK: High-Payload Robotic Wheel-Module Platform

Co-founder & lead engineer, sole engineer across mechanical, embedded, and software

A patent-pending, 3D-printed robotic wheel module rated to ~500 kg that converts passive structures into AGVs, shortlisted for the Rolls-Royce Aerospace Open Innovation Challenge 2026.

  • BLDC
  • 3D-Printed Structure
  • FEA
  • AprilTag Localisation
  • Motion Control
2015 – 2022Field roboticsNDA-abstracted

Q-Bot: 5-Axis Robotic Rendering & Material-Manipulation System

Installation technician → robotics engineer → design engineer, technical lead of the 5-axis system

Technical lead for a 5-axis robotic rendering system that pairs coarse toolpaths generated from a 3D scan with a sensorised compliant tool head, so the machine adapts to the real wall geometry the scan cannot resolve. Named co-inventor on the resulting patent.

  • 5-Axis Motion
  • Compliant Mechanisms
  • Force Control
  • Toolpath Generation
  • Substrate Localisation
2023 – presentProduct design

Impact Pro: Padel Ball Machine & Training System

Co-founder, sole engineer across mechanical, embedded, app, and cloud

An ultra-compact tennis/padel ball machine and its full software system: a Flutter app with a custom BLE binary protocol, physics-based shot control, ML swing analysis and a tactics engine, plus a Rails control plane that builds, verifies, and releases the machine's firmware.

  • BLDC
  • ESP32
  • BLE
  • Flutter
  • Rails
2025 – presentSoftware

Drooli: Dog Food Recipe App & CMS for Dog's Lounge

Sole developer: app, backend, CMS, and delivery (JJKSoftware)

A commercial Flutter recipe app for Dog's Lounge, live on the App Store and Google Play, backed by a Rails API with a variant-based nutrition data model, a transactional lab-data import pipeline, and full Shopify storefront integration. Built and delivered solo.

  • Flutter
  • Ruby on Rails
  • PostgreSQL
  • Shopify
  • CMS
2022 – 2025Software

Florence: Production Mobile Software at 250k+ Users

Full Stack Developer, owned iOS + Android release cycles end-to-end

Full Stack Developer at Florence, the UK healthcare shift platform, owning iOS and Android release cycles for a product with 250,000+ active users, from feature development through deployment and monitoring.

  • iOS
  • Android
  • Release Engineering
  • Monitoring
  • Healthcare Tech
All work

Technician to founder

I started as a technician, worked my way up through robotics and design engineering roles, and spent seven years leading Q-Bot's robotic platform through three promotions to technical lead. Along the way I've founded two hardware products and shipped consumer software to a quarter-million users.

The full story

Let's talk

Open to senior robotics / mechatronics roles.

joshua.kiff@gmail.com