Robotics Engineer

Senior / Staff Robotics Engineer — Motion PlanningA 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, USALocation and logisticsThis 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 roleYou'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 doArchitect local planners (MPC, MPPI, or custom contouring control) that convert AI-generated routes into trajectories a heavy, non-holonomic base can physically executeBuild high-performance C++ pipelines that ingest neural network outputs in real-time and convert them into deterministic constraintsEnsure planners adjust dynamically to shifting centre of mass caused by a lifting column and dual-arm payloadsBuild the deterministic C++ safety layer that overrides AI inputs when a commanded path violates safety constraintsArchitect interfaces to the company's upcoming Whole-Body Control (WBC) architectureWhat you'll bringPh.D. in Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science or related field — or M.S. + 4 years relevant industry experienceHands-on experience developing and tuning advanced local planners for mobile robots in unstructured environmentsStrong grounding in rigid body dynamics — kinematics, vehicle dynamics, centre-of-mass constraints for top-heavy platformsModern C++ (17/20) expertise with real-time performance and low-latency executionA track record of deploying autonomous navigation stacks on real, physical platforms in the fieldGood to have: WBC/manipulation frameworks, applied SLAM/state estimation in visually degraded environments, slip/traction estimation, CUDA acceleration for trajectory sampling.Location and logisticsThis 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).