Engineering Lead, Robotics

Engineering Lead, Robotics

Location: Sunnyvale, CA (Onsite)
Compensation: $275,000–$375,000 Base + Equity

About the Company

Our client is a rapidly growing AI and robotics company building software and infrastructure that enables intelligent autonomous systems across industries including transportation, defense, logistics, industrial automation, and advanced robotics. The company partners with some of the world's largest organizations to develop next-generation autonomy, simulation, and machine learning technologies for real-world applications.

About the Role

This is a founding technical leadership opportunity to help build and shape a new robotics organization from the ground up. The role combines hands-on software development, technical architecture, and strategic leadership. You will define the technical direction for robotics software and AI systems while actively building and deploying production software on physical robotic platforms.

This is primarily an individual contributor role with significant technical ownership and the opportunity to influence future team growth.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the architecture for robotics software systems spanning perception, planning, control, and learned behaviors.

• Develop production-quality software in Python and C++ for deployment on physical robots.

• Design, train, evaluate, and deploy machine learning-based policies for manipulation and locomotion.

• Build and validate robotic capabilities through demonstrations on real hardware platforms.

• Develop simulation environments and testing infrastructure to validate behaviors before hardware deployment.

• Analyze telemetry, operational data, and system performance to improve robustness and reliability.

• Work closely with data collection and teleoperation systems to improve model performance and close the sim-to-real gap.

• Help recruit and mentor future members of the robotics engineering team.

Qualifications

• BS, MS, or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.

• 7+ years of robotics software development experience, preferably involving humanoid, legged, or advanced manipulation systems.

• Experience deploying machine learning-based robotic systems in real-world environments.

• Strong programming skills in Python and C++.

• Experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch.

• Deep understanding of robotics fundamentals, including kinematics, dynamics, control systems, state estimation, and perception.

• Experience building end-to-end visuomotor or multimodal robotic learning systems, from data collection through deployment.

• Ability to thrive in an early-stage, fast-moving environment with significant ownership and autonomy.

• Comfortable working directly with robotic hardware, debugging systems, and running hardware-in-the-loop testing.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with dexterous manipulation, whole-body control, or advanced mobile robotics platforms.

• Familiarity with hardware bring-up, sensor integration, or embedded systems.

• Background in SLAM, 3D perception, sensor fusion, or computer vision.

• Experience with robotics simulation platforms such as MuJoCo, NVIDIA Isaac Sim, or Gazebo.

• Familiarity with ROS/ROS2 or similar robotics middleware.

• Research publications or open-source contributions in robotics, embodied AI, or machine learning.

This version preserves the technical depth while removing any identifying details about the company.