Head of Robotics Engineering
$200,000–$400,000 year
On-siteFremont, California, United States
Job Summary
Own the architecture and roadmap for robot-side firmware, including real-time control loops, sensor/actuator interfaces, and safety systems. Lead development of the control and planning stack for locomotion, manipulation, and whole-body behavior while extending capabilities on the deployed product line. Manage the teleoperation system for remote control and data collection, and build the customer support function with clear escalation paths for field issues. Drive root-cause analysis across mechanical, electrical, and firmware domains to translate failures into design or process fixes. Set engineering standards for code review, testing, and release discipline, while staying hands-on writing and reviewing critical firmware and control-system code. Partner directly with CEO, software architecture, and mechanical teams to align robot-side software, cloud platform, and hardware development. Represent robot engineering to enterprise partners during technical evaluations and pilots.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years in robotics engineering with a strong traditional foundation: dynamics, kinematics, control theory (impedance/admittance control, whole-body control), and state estimation
- Experience owning a shipped hardware product post-launch: field root-cause analysis, firmware releases, and incremental improvement over the product's deployed life — not just pre-launch development
- Still hands-on: writes and reviews production firmware/controls code regularly, not just architecture docs
- Deep experience with embedded/real-time software: RTOS or PREEMPT_RT environments, sensor/actuator driver integration, real-time scheduling and timing constraints, and hardware-software co-design
- Experience architecting firmware for safety-critical behavior: fault detection, graceful degradation, and safe-state handling when sensors or actuators fail
- Experience with robot control and planning systems: locomotion, manipulation, whole-body control, or equivalent domains (e.g., autonomous vehicle motion planning), including tradeoffs between classical control and learning-based approaches
- Comfort operating at the interface between controls, perception, and higher-level planning/AI systems
- Solid cross-disciplinary hardware understanding — mechanical design and mechanisms, PCB/electronics, actuators, sensors, and wiring — enough to lead root-cause investigations that span mechanical, electrical, and firmware domains rather than handing off at the first domain boundary
- Comfort driving corrective actions with hardware and manufacturing teams, including translating a field failure into a design change, process change, or manufacturing fix
- Experience building or operating teleoperation systems: low-latency remote control, operator interface design, and the data pipelines that turn teleoperation sessions into usable training data
- Experience building or scaling a customer-facing technical support function — triage processes, escalation paths, and the discipline to turn field issues into prioritized engineering work rather than one-off fires
- Experience building technical training programs for engineering or field teams, ideally in a hardware or robotics context
- Track record of hiring and developing engineers across firmware, controls, and field-facing roles
Desired Qualifications
- Experience with humanoid robots or other complex multi-DOF robotic systems specifically
- Prior startup leadership experience, ideally as an early robotics engineering leader scaling a team from single digits
- Familiarity with the compute/networking stack robots typically run on (e.g., Jetson-class edge compute, EtherCAT, real-time Linux)
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