Robotics Integration/Controls Engineer (Full-Stack Capable)
Lightspeed · Northbrook, IL · 1 mo ago
On-siteEngineeringContract
About LightSpeed
LightSpeed Build Technologies is revolutionizing the construction industry through AI-powered robotics. Our flagship systems—BRUTE for automated wall panel manufacturing and DEX for on-site collaborative construction—are addressing the global housing crisis by delivering unprecedented speed, precision, and affordability in homebuilding.
What you will work on:
- Bring up and integrate robot arms and the surrounding control system
- Design and tune motion, tooling, sequencing, and safety logic
- Integrate sensors, actuators, and I/O
- Build the real-time control/telemetry layer — stream motion and sensor data, model job/device state as explicit state machines, expose a clean API contract for the application and operator console to consume
- Stand up and maintain a simulation environment that mirrors the physical cell, so work can proceed in parallel with hardware and demos never block on a single robot
- Integrate vision/perception where the task requires it
- Write the supporting software around the robotics and controls — services, scripts, and APIs — and coordinate with the application team against a shared control-plane contract
Required skills:
- Robotics or industrial controls experience - hands-on bring-up and integration of robot arms (cobots a plus) and/or automated cells, motion control, PLC/industrial automation, sensor and actuator integration, in a real, physical setting
- Real-time integration — comfortable with control loops, I/O, and streaming machine state; modeling device/job state and telemetry (WebSockets/SSE, pub/sub, fieldbus, or equivalent)
- Programming - Python and/or C++ for robotics and integration work; scripting comfort generally
- Enough full-stack ability to build the software around the hardware — APIs, services, a basic data layer (Node/TypeScript and Postgres in our stack, but we care more that you can work across it than that you've used our exact tools)
- Pragmatic, demo-driven, comfortable owning ambiguity in an early-stage build
Strongly preferred / differentiators:
- ROS/ROS2-building and debugging real nodes, topics, and control loops
- Simulation frameworks — Isaac Sim, Gazebo, MuJoCo, or similar; experience standing up a sim that meaningfully mirrors real hardware
- AI/ML in robotics - learned policies, imitation/RL, or forward-looking approaches (e.g. VLA-style models)
- Vision/perception - object detection, pose estimation, hand-eye calibration SLAM or other spatial/localization work, especially on mobile platforms
- Functional safety - e-stop logic, safety-rated I/O, risk assessment for automated equipment
Employment Relationship:
This position is at-will, meaning either you or the Company may terminate employment at any time, with or without cause or notice.
Equal Opportunity:
LightSpeed Build Technologies is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and experiences.