Planning & Controls Engineer

About the role

We’re looking for an experienced Planning & Controls Engineer to join our team. As an early member, you will play a pivotal role in building and shaping the AI capabilities of our robots. You will work on challenging planning/control problems around manipulation and navigation in dynamic outdoor environments. You’ll need to thrive in a fast-paced startup environment where you’ll wear multiple hats and have a direct impact on our product’s evolution. Ideally, you have a proven track record of developing and deploying planning/control systems in production, and you’re passionate about pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in robotics with AI.

What you’ll get to work on

• Develop and deploy state-of-the-art planning and control techniques for challenging manipulation and navigation problems.

• Help drive our technical approach, with particular focus on real-world deployments.
• Research and develop techniques around generating real-time, safe, efficient trajectories for multiple embodiments like robot manipulators and mobile robots.
• Develop scalable planning representations for classical and learned techniques.
• Leverage GPUs to generate and evaluate trajectories at scale.
• Enable real-time, closed-loop control leveraging classical algorithms and ML.
• Develop simulation techniques and metrics to benchmark and evaluate performance.
• Collaborate with other teams in the company.

What we look for

• M.S/Ph.D degree in robotics, vision, computer science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering or other engineering disciplines (or equivalent experience).

• 4+ years of hands-on experience developing planning/control solutions for robotics applications like manipulation and navigation.
• Experience working on one or more of trajectory generation, optimization, sampling, cost/reward shaping and control.
• Experience working with robotics simulation infrastructure (e.g. Isaac Sim, Gazebo).
• Proficient with C++ and comfortable with Python.

• Should be comfortable taking ownership of tasks with light supervision.

• Must have excellent problem-solving skills.

• Legally authorized to work in the United States.