About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Robotics Software Engineer to lead the design and development of robot behaviors that expand and generalize our humanoid robot’s real-world capabilities. In this role, you will own behavior design end-to-end, from high-level task logic and system design down to on-robot validation and deployment. You will work at the intersection of behavior planning, motion planning, and manipulation, developing new autonomy capabilities and pushing the robot into new classes of tasks. This is a highly hands-on role for someone who enjoys designing complex behavior systems, working closely with motion planners and hardware, and seeing new capabilities come to life on real robots.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the design and implementation of complex robot behaviors.
• Lead behavior planning and execution design, including task decomposition, control flow, and failure handling.
• Develop new autonomy capabilities that expand what the robot can reliably do in the real world.
• Work closely with motion planning, controls, and perception engineers to integrate behaviors with underlying systems.
• Design and implement new behaviors end-to-end, from initial concept through deployment.
• Develop and evaluate new manipulation strategies for novel tasks, objects, and environments.
• Support the integration of new end effectors, tools, and hardware capabilities into the behavior stack.
• Generalize behaviors across tasks, object types, and environments to reduce custom logic.
• Define what “production-ready” means for new behaviors and drive the validation strategy to meet reliability goals.
• Debug complex system-level failures using logs, replay, and on-robot experimentation.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to technical direction and best practices within the team.

About You

• B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field.
• 5+ years of professional experience developing robotics software, autonomy systems, or robot behaviors (or equivalent experience through advanced degrees and hands-on research).
• Strong proficiency in Python; comfortable contributing to large, long-lived codebases.
• Solid experience working in Linux-based development environments.
• Hands-on experience designing robot behaviors, task planners, or autonomy systems.
• Experience with behavior trees, state machines, task planners, or similar behavior-planning frameworks.
• Experience with motion planning and behavior planning for robots or other autonomous systems, with a strong understanding of how these systems interact.
• Experience working with complex algorithms and data pipelines, with an ability to optimize for performance, robustness, and scalability.
• Strong system-level understanding of how motion planning, perception, and control interact on real robots.
• Comfortable designing autonomy systems that operate under uncertainty and recover from failure.
• Experience collaborating across perception, planning, controls, and hardware teams.
• Comfortable operating at the system-design level while still being hands-on with implementation and on-robot testing.
• Strong ownership mindset with a focus on robustness, generalization, and real-world reliability.

Bonus Points

• Experience developing manipulation strategies for complex or unstructured environments.
• Experience integrating new hardware capabilities (e.g., end effectors, sensors, tools) into autonomous systems.
• Experience deploying and supporting autonomous robots in real customer environments.
• Prior experience mentoring engineers or leading technical initiatives.