Senior / Staff Robotics Engineer — Motion Planning
A robotics company building Physical AI-powered robots for industrial environments is hiring a Senior/Staff Robotics Engineer to own the local mobility and safety stack for their humanoid fleet.
Location; Milpitas CA, USA
Location and logistics
This is a US-based position, 5 days/week on-site. Visa sponsorship and green card support are available for qualified candidates.
Compensation
$265,000 USD (DoE) base + bonus + equity, plus health/dental/vision and 401(k).
The role
You'll sit between the AI perception team and the physical robot. You'll take traversability and semantic costmaps generated by neural network outputs and convert them into safe, deterministic motion — accounting for a top-heavy, dual-arm platform operating on unpredictable terrain.
What you'll do
- Architect local planners (MPC, MPPI, or custom contouring control) that convert AI-generated routes into trajectories a heavy, non-holonomic base can physically execute
- Build high-performance C++ pipelines that ingest neural network outputs in real-time and convert them into deterministic constraints
- Ensure planners adjust dynamically to shifting centre of mass caused by a lifting column and dual-arm payloads
- Build the deterministic C++ safety layer that overrides AI inputs when a commanded path violates safety constraints
- Architect interfaces to the company's upcoming Whole-Body Control (WBC) architecture
What you'll bring
- Ph.D. in Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science or related field — or M.S. + 4 years relevant industry experience
- Hands-on experience developing and tuning advanced local planners for mobile robots in unstructured environments
- Strong grounding in rigid body dynamics — kinematics, vehicle dynamics, centre-of-mass constraints for top-heavy platforms
- Modern C++ (17/20) expertise with real-time performance and low-latency execution
- A track record of deploying autonomous navigation stacks on real, physical platforms in the field
Good to have: WBC/manipulation frameworks, applied SLAM/state estimation in visually degraded environments, slip/traction estimation, CUDA acceleration for trajectory sampling.
Location and logistics
This is a US-based position, 5 days/week on-site. Visa sponsorship and green card support are available for qualified candidates.
Compensation
$160,000–$265,000 USD base + bonus + equity, plus health/dental/vision and 401(k).