Robotics Engineer I

About the role

At Blue Origin, we envision millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth. We’re working to develop reusable, safe, and low-cost space vehicles and systems within a culture of safety, collaboration, and inclusion. Join our team of problem solvers as we add new chapters to the history of spaceflight!

The New Product Formulation team turns ideas and early concepts into credible products. This role combines robotics simulation, learned manipulation policies, and hands-on hardware to answer the questions that shape new robotic products. You'll build simulation environments, train and evaluate robot manipulation policies, operate real hardware, and run the experiments that inform system-level trades on mobility, manipulation, power, and compute. The work spans the full stack — writing control software in ROS 2 one day, collecting teleoperation data the next, and presenting trade study results to stakeholders by end of the week. If you're energized by switching between a sim environment, a lab bench, and a design review, this is the role.

Responsibilities

• Develop, train, fine-tune, and evaluate robot manipulation policies (e.g., vision-language-action models, imitation learning, reinforcement learning) on multi-step tasks.
• Collect teleoperation demonstration data and build the data pipelines used for policy training and benchmarking.
• Build and maintain simulation environments in NVIDIA Omniverse, Isaac Sim, and Isaac Lab, including custom terrain, lighting, and physical conditions, and work to close the sim-to-real gap.
• Integrate, bring up, and operate robot hardware, including arms, dexterous hands and grippers, cameras, force/torque sensors, and commercial platforms.
• Write and maintain robot software in ROS 2, including control interfaces, perception pipelines, and safety limits on joints, forces, and workspace.
• Support system-level trade studies for mobility, power, thermal, compute, and communications by running analyses, simulations, and prototype tests that inform design decisions.
• Document results clearly and share findings with the broader team and stakeholders.

Requirements

• Minimum of a B.S. degree in Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, or a related field.
• Hands-on experience with real robot hardware through coursework, research, internships, or project teams (e.g., competition robotics, rover teams, lab work).
• Proficiency in Python. Working knowledge of C++.
• Familiarity with robot kinematics, dynamics, and control fundamentals.
• Experience with at least one robotics simulation environment.
• Comfort working in a lab: assembling hardware, wiring, debugging sensors, and safely operating robots.
• Must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.

Preferred Qualifications

• M.S. in a relevant field, or equivalent research experience.
• Experience training or fine-tuning learned robot policies (imitation learning, RL, VLA/foundation models) using frameworks such