Staff Robotics System and Control Engineer
$164,000–$282,000 year
On-siteMountain View Santa Clara County, California, United States
Job Summary
Design, implement, and optimize motion-planning, trajectory-optimization, manipulation-planning, and feedback-control algorithms for robotic systems. Develop planning and control software for collision avoidance, constrained motion, grasping, and task execution in dynamic environments. Integrate these modules with perception, state estimation, kinematics, and hardware while building production-quality robotics software. Establish simulation, testing, and validation workflows to assess safety, robustness, and task success. Diagnose issues during robot bring-up and field testing using data-driven methods to improve system reliability. Collaborate with multidisciplinary teams to define system interfaces, compute requirements, and deployment architectures. Contribute to technical roadmaps, architecture decisions, and engineering best practices while staying current with advances in robotics planning and foundation models.
Required Qualifications
- Master's degree or Ph.D. with 2~4 years' experience in industrial in Robotics, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Control, or a closely related field
- Strong foundation in robotics, including kinematics, dynamics, state estimation, motion planning, trajectory optimization, optimal control, and feedback control
- Demonstrated experience developing planning and control algorithms for robot manipulators, mobile robots, humanoids, or other complex robotic platforms
- Proficiency in C++, with experience writing maintainable, tested, and performance-conscious production software
- Hands-on experience with robotics open-source ecosystems and libraries such as ROS/ROS 2, MoveIt, cuRobo, Pinocchio, OMPL, Drake, Isaac Sim, or equivalent tools
- Experience integrating and debugging a full robotic system across software, sensors, actuators, middleware, simulation, and hardware
- Real-world industrial robotics experience, including deploying, validating, or supporting robots in manufacturing, logistics, warehousing, inspection, service, or comparable operational environments
- Strong analytical, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills
Desired Qualifications
- Proven record of deploying reliable autonomy, manipulation, or motion-control systems at scale in industrial or commercial settings
- Expertise in modern GPU-accelerated planning, differentiable optimization, sampling-based planning, model predictive control (MPC), whole-body control, or real-time trajectory generation
- Experience with state-of-the-art learning-enabled robotics approaches, including vision-language-action (VLA) models, world models, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, diffusion policies, and sim-to-real methods
- Experience combining learned policies or foundation models with classical planning, optimization, safety constraints, and control methods
- Familiarity with multimodal perception, scene understanding, grasp synthesis, contact-rich manipulation, or closed-loop visual servoing
- Experience with simulation platforms, digital twins, synthetic-data pipelines, and automated regression or hardware-in-the-loop testing
- Contributions to open-source robotics projects, peer-reviewed publications, patents, or demonstrated technical leadership in the robotics community
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