Robotics Engineer

Company Description

Lumen Labs is building the cognitive layer for physical AI. Nearly every major robotics effort today teaches machines by showing them thousands of hours of human teleoperation. We think that paradigm has a ceiling, and that the path to robots that genuinely adapt runs through a different kind of learning and we are trying to figure out what that is. We are primarily focused on nature inspired AI architectures for unstructured environments (construction sites, mining, oil pipelines, battlefield — places where no pre-training will help).

Role Description

You'll own the hardware and infrastructure that keeps our research platforms running. Today that's wheeled navigation, we're dipping our toes into drones, and we're eyeing weirder platforms like pipeline inspection. This means maintaining and extending ROS nodes across onboard and offboard compute, integrating new sensors (audio, speech, vision), managing the safety pipeline during autonomous runs, and keeping the data logging pipeline clean and reliable. As we scale our physical prototypes, you'll architect the ROS infrastructure.

You’ll need to work closely with our model engineers to figure out how to bridge the sim2real gap for specific robots and tasks. You won't need to set up the sims yourself, but you'll be the one getting trained policies onto real hardware. You will need to work closely with the rest of the team to figure out where the robot and environment differs from the sim and how to mitigate those differences.

We provide competitive compensation (salary + equity). We also have health insurance and provide visa/relocation support.

What You'll Do

• Build and maintain the ROS2 workspace for robot control: the node architecture, topic graph, and inter-process communication across robot and laptop compute
• Deploy trained policies to the robot: observation assembly, inference at a fixed control rate, command publication, logging
• Integrate and calibrate sensors: LiDAR, depth camera, IMU, encoders, microphone, and future additions. Calibrate the sensors against physical measurements.
• Diagnose and localize robotics problems and figure out the appropriate firmware/hardware fix.
• Own the safety pipeline and real-world safety behavior during autonomous experimental runs
• Help the team bridge the gap between sim2real: characteristic testing on hardware (system identification), domain randomization, creating digital twins, fine-tuning on hardware
• Manage hardware bring-up, Docker environments, and on-device dependencies.
• Run experimental trials, maintain logging infrastructure, and ensure data quality

You'll thrive here if you've built and run real robots of more than one kind, and have done off-the-beaten-path side projects along the way.

Requirements

• Comfortable with ROS2 (Humble) across different robot platforms
• Strong Python + embedded coding experience; comfortable reading code you didn't write (vendor SDKs, ROS packages, firmware).
• Hands-on experience with real mobile robot platforms: UART devices, encoders, PWM, IMU, LiDAR, odometry measurements
• Understanding of real-time control implementation (PID, sensor polling, fixed-rate control loops)
• Can debug hardware and firmware simultaneously (and are okay with the "head-banging" that comes with this 🙃)

Nice to Have

• Experience with NVIDIA Jetson and ESP32s
• Sensor fusion / state estimation (EKF, SLAM)
• Basic RL literacy: Transform sensor readings into sensor and reward vector for a policy, and transform an action vector into motor outputs. Understand action bounds, normalization constraints, termination conditions, etc.
• Have perspectives on embodied intelligence outside of just robotics (cognitive science, neuroscience, theories of mind, etc.)
• Solved complex sensor interface problems

You'll fit right in if:

• You spend your weekends and evenings in strange side projects — building rovers, adding sensors to drones, 3D printing conductive inks, etc.
• You are "T-shaped". The requirements are your main skills but you are happy to go outside your comfort zone.
• You can set your own goals and you don't shrink from hard problems without structured answers.
• You're lightning-fast at learning new things and just a bit delusional.

A final note: From our experience of building companies, we wanted to share the following note about working at Lumen — working at a startup this size means you have to be lightning fast at learning new things, have a passion for building, and a wee bit delusional.

We believe we are building a generational company. While difficult, it is also extremely rewarding and fun. If that resonates, send us a note at hi@lumenresearch.co telling us a bit about you, projects you've worked on in the past, and why you'd want to work at Lumen. If you can link us to a project where you got a trained policy running on real hardware, then your application will move to the top of our pile.