Senior Robotics Engineer, Dexterous Manipulation

Department: Robotics

Location: Abu Dhabi

Employment Type: FullTime

Why Analog, and why now

Analog builds robots that work in the real world, deployed in Abu Dhabi. Our robots are already out in clinics and outdoors. They are getting good at moving through the world. The next step is getting them to do things with their hands.

The robot comes with dexterous, multi-finger hands already built, plus a set of cameras and touch sensors in the wrists to guide grasping. What's missing is the person who makes those hands actually useful: picking things up, handling them, and recovering when it goes wrong. If you've shipped that on real hardware, this is a rare chance to own it from day one at a 77-person company, in one city, with a team that's here because they want to be. Ana, our neural agent, is also meant to get a robotic body someday, and manipulation is a big part of how she'll get there.

What we're looking for, and why

Someone who has taken dexterous manipulation out of simulation and onto real robots. Grasping in simulation and grasping in real life are still far apart, and the only way to close that gap is hands-on experience. You've done that on multi-finger hands.

We want depth in one hard problem, not a bit of everything. That's what takes us from impressive demos to capabilities that win new customers.

What you'll be working on

You'll build the full manipulation pipeline on top of our existing dexterous hands:

• Grasp planning and selection

• Arm and hand trajectory execution

• Failure detection and recovery, using force and tactile feedback

You'll connect all of it to the hand drivers and motion control stack, then get it running reliably on deployed robots, in real conditions, not just in simulation.

What makes this role different

• You're the manipulation specialist. You'll shape how we approach grasping and manipulation, and your decisions will stick.

• Real hardware, real conditions. You test on actual robots in the same building, then watch them go into the field.

• Flat structure. No layers between you and the people making decisions, so good ideas move fast.

• Hands are given. You build the intelligence on top of existing dexterous hands instead of designing hardware from scratch.

Skills we need

• 5+ years in robot manipulation on real hardware, with deployment to real robots not simulation

• Experience building end-to-end manipulation pipelines on dexterous / multi-finger hands: perception, grasp selection, execution, failure recovery

• 6D object pose estimation and grasp planning

• Inverse kinematics and arm / hand trajectory planning (e.g. MoveIt 2)

• Integration with hand drivers and motion control APIs, including force / tactile feedback

• ROS 2, C++, Python

Nice to have

• Learning from demonstration and teleoperation data (imitation learning, VLA policies)

• Simulation for manipulation (Isaac Sim, MuJoCo)

• Humanoid or mobile manipulation experience

What we're not looking for

• Experience that lives only in simulation or simulator training

• People who have only worked with simple grippers, not multi-finger hands

• People who want to design robotic hands from scratch

• People who want to manage rather than build

• People who want a remote or fixed-hours setup. We're in-person by choice and work happens next to the robots