ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES or KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES
Real-Time Control Software: Oversee development of the real-time control framework that runs on the robot, including robot drivers, state estimation, control interfaces, and the integration of learned policies and teleoperation.
Execution & Planning: Plan and drive the team's deliverables in coordination with other leads within the broader Controls roadmap. Break program goals into deliverable work, track progress against milestones, and raise risks to schedule or quality early.
Team Leadership & Growth: Hire, manage, and mentor a team of controls and software engineers. Set clear priorities and ownership, give regular feedback, and develop engineers and tech leads into stronger technical contributors.
Quality & Release: Maintain a high bar for code quality through design reviews, code reviews, and automated testing, including simulation and hardware-in-the-loop regression tests. Own the team's part of the software release process and the stability of what ships to the fleet.
Iteration Speed: Keep the control software and tooling fast to work with, so engineers can quickly try new approaches to hard robotics problems in simulation and on hardware.
Simulation & Hardware Validation: Ensure the control stack behaves consistently in simulation and on hardware, and support robot bring-up, calibration tooling, and root-cause analysis of issues found in testing and in the field.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with the firmware, embedded software, learning, teleoperation, systems, and test teams to align on interfaces, priorities, and schedules, and represent the team in stakeholder reviews.
SKILLS AND REQUIREMENTS
Technical Skills (Must-Have)
Controls Background: Strong foundation in robot kinematics, dynamics, and control, with hands-on experience in areas such as whole-body control, manipulation, or teleoperation.
Real-Time Software: Experience building or leading development of real-time robotic software in C++, including multi-threaded execution, timing, and hardware interfaces.
Hardware Deployment: A track record of taking control software from simulation to physical robots and supporting it in testing and deployment.
People Leadership: Experience managing or leading engineers, including hiring, mentoring, performance feedback, and setting team priorities.
Execution: Experience planning and delivering software in a fast-moving R&D environment, balancing near-term deliverables with long-term code health.
Good to Have
Humanoid or Legged Robots: Experience with humanoid, legged, or mobile manipulation platforms.
State Estimation & System Identification: Experience with state estimation and system identification for robotic systems.
Learned Policy Integration: Experience integrating reinforcement learning or other learned policies into a real-time control stack.
Simulation Environments: Experience with physics engines such as MuJoCo, IsaacSim, or Drake.
Testing Infrastructure: Experience with hardware-in-the-loop testing, continuous integration, and release processes for robotics software.
Robotics Middleware: Familiarity with ROS 2 or similar robotics middleware.
EDUCATION and/or EXPERIENCE
MS or PhD in Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field.
4+ years of relevant industry experience in robot controls or robotics software (or 2+ years with a PhD), including 1+ year managing engineers and 2+ years as a technical lead.
PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS
Prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer
Must be able to lift 15 pounds at times
Vision to read printed materials and a computer screen
Hearing and speech to communicate
This is a direct hire. Please, no outside Agency solicitations.
Apptronik provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
