Head of Robotics Engineering

About the role

You'll own the engineering organization responsible for making the robot work reliably in the real world — the firmware that runs on the robot, the control and planning systems that make it move and act intelligently, the teleoperation systems that let humans operate and collect data from it, and the technical training and support functions that keep robots running once they're deployed with customers and partners, etc. This is a hands-on leadership role spanning deep embedded/controls engineering, hardware root-cause investigation, and the operational discipline of supporting physical robots in the field.

What You'll Do

• Own the architecture and roadmap for robot-side firmware: real-time control loops, sensor/actuator interfaces, safety systems, and the low-level software running on the robot's onboard compute.
• Lead development of the control and planning stack: locomotion, manipulation, whole-body control, and the real-time systems that translate high-level commands into safe, reliable robot behavior.
• Lead controls, firmware, and hardware sustaining engineering for the deployed product line, including developing new capabilities on the existing platform — not just maintaining what's shipped, but extending it.
• Own the teleoperation system: the software and interfaces that let operators control robots remotely and collect training data, including latency, reliability, and operator-experience tradeoffs.
• Build and manage the customer support team, with clear escalation paths and response processes for issues arising from deployed robots.
• Turn customer feedback and fleet data into root-caused, prioritized engineering work; drive fixes through to validated releases deployed back to robots in the field.
• Investigate hardware failures arising from customer use and drive corrective actions in partnership with hardware and manufacturing teams — closing the loop from field failure to design or process fix.
• Build and lead the engineering training function: onboarding and up-skilling engineers (internal and field-facing) on firmware, controls, and teleoperation systems as the team and fleet scale.
• Set engineering standards across firmware, controls, and teleoperation: code review practices, testing and validation for safety-critical robot behavior, and release/rollout discipline for software running on physical hardware.
• Stay hands-on — write and review code directly on critical systems, especially firmware and control-system work where getting the fundamentals right early prevents expensive rework later.
• Partner directly with the CEO, the software platform architecture lead, and mechanical/electrical engineering to keep robot-side software, cloud platform, and hardware development in sync.
• Represent robot engineering to enterprise partners and customers during technical evaluations, pilots, and escalations.

Requirements

• Core experience 8+ years in robotics engineering with a strong traditional foundation: dynamics, kinematics, control theory (impedance/admittance control, whole-body control), and state estimation.
• Experience owning a shipped hardware product post-launch: field root-cause analysis, firmware releases, and incremental improvement over the product's deployed life — not just pre-launch development.
• Still hands-on: writes and reviews production firmware/controls code regularly, not just architecture docs.
• Firmware and real-time systems: Deep experience with embedded/real-time software: RTOS or PREEMPT_RT environments, sensor/actuator driver integration, real-time scheduling and timing constraints, and hardware-software co-design.
• Experience architecting firmware for safety-critical behavior: fault detection, graceful degradation, and safe-state handling when sensors or actuators fail.
• Controls and planning: Experience with robot control and planning systems: locomotion, manipulation, whole-body control, or equivalent domains (e.g., autonomous vehicle motion planning), including tradeoffs between classical control and learning-based approaches.
• Comfort operating at the interface between controls, perception, and higher-level planning/AI systems.
• Cross-disciplinary hardware root-cause: Solid cross-disciplinary hardware understanding — mechanical design and mechanisms, PCB/electronics, actuators, sensors, and wiring — enough to lead root-cause investigations that span mechanical, electrical, and firmware domains rather than handing off at the first domain boundary.
• Comfort driving corrective actions with hardware and manufacturing teams, including translating a field failure into a design change, process change, or manufacturing fix.
• Teleoperation: Experience building or operating teleoperation systems: low-latency remote control, operator interface design, and the data pipelines that turn teleoperation sessions into usable training data.
• Field operations and org-building: Experience building or scaling a customer-facing technical support function — triage processes, escalation paths, and the discipline to turn field issues into prioritized engineering work rather than one-off fires.
• Experience building technical training programs for engineering or field teams, ideally in a hardware or robotics context.
• Track record of hiring and developing engineers across firmware, controls, and field-facing roles.