Robotics Engineer, Mission Autonomy

Location: San Francisco, California, United States

Department: Engineering - ML&AI & Data

Workplace: on_site

Employment Type: full

Description

The Bigger Picture

At Andromeda, we're building the social intelligence layer for humanoid robots - technology that allows robots to understand people, build relationships and become a meaningful part of everyday life.

Our first robot, Abi, is already doing this in aged care and healthcare, where she brings conversation, companionship and engagement to people every day.

Now we're scaling from early deployments into a platform that can operate across thousands of real-world environments. We're looking for individuals who want to tackle hard problems across robotics and AI, and help define what it means for robots to live and interact alongside people. 

The Opportunity

Abi needs more than individual systems that work in isolation. Across a full shift, she needs to decide what to do next, understand changing context, coordinate conversation and robotics capabilities, and recover safely when a plan breaks.

As a Robotics Engineer, Mission Autonomy, you will define and build the decision layer that makes this possible. You’ll shape the architecture, work across the teams that own Abi’s underlying capabilities, and take the first mission-autonomy system from simulation to the robot.

What you’ll do

• Set the architecture and technical roadmap for long-horizon, mission-level decision-making on Abi.
• Explore and evaluate approaches including agent systems, structured planners, world models, and vision-language-action methods and choose what works best for Abi’s real operating constraints.
• Turn goals and context into executable plans using reusable, well-defined actions. Specify the interfaces, preconditions, success signals, and failure behavior those actions need.
• Orchestrate Abi’s conversation, perception, audio, navigation, gestures, and operator systems while preserving the context needed for coherent behavior.
• Design replanning, recovery, and degraded-operation behaviors. When a resident is unavailable or a subsystem fails, Abi should respond safely and usefully, and make the situation legible to operators.
• Build a simulation-first prototype and evaluation system. Create scenarios, benchmarks, replay and failure analysis to measure long-horizon task completion, interventions, recovery, and the factors that limit autonomy.
• Establish a repeatable path from simulation to robot testing, including observability, test gates, configuration, and rollback.
• Work hands-on with Abi and collaborate with the teams responsible for voice, mobile autonomy, perception, gestures, audio, and platform systems.

Requirements

• 5+ years building robotics or autonomous systems, or equivalent practical experience. An advanced degree is welcome but not a substitute for demonstrated engineering depth.

• Evidence of deploying autonomous robots or systems that operate autonomously over extended periods—from tens of minutes to multiple hours. 
• Experience taking an autonomy capability from prototype through testing and deployment on a physical system.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python, C++, or Rust with sound judgment around architecture, interfaces, and testing.
• Experience with robotics middleware for example ROS 2 and its limitations. Bonus if you’ve “de-rosified” systems before
• Using simulation tools (Isaac Sim, Gazebo, or MuJoCo, or comparable) to verify and validate autonomous systems and characterize their failure modes.
• Practical robotics skills: comfortable debugging hardware, sensors, actuators, and runtime behavior on a robot.
• The ability to reason clearly about reliability and safety when robots operate around people.
• Strong communication and technical influence: you can align teams around interfaces and decisions, including when you do not own every part of the system.

• Long-horizon robotic task planning, behavior orchestration, agent tool use, or error recovery using LLMs, VLMs, or related methods.
• Planning and behavior architectures such as task-and-motion planning, PDDL, behavior trees, or state machines.
• Simulation-based evaluation, including scenario design, metrics, failure taxonomies, and reporting.
• Human-robot interaction or deployment of robots in care, service, field, warehouse, or other human-facing environments.

Benefits

The expected base salary for this role is $185,000 to $240,000 plus benefits and equity.

PLEASE NOTE: The advertised salary range is intended as a guide. For an exceptional candidate whose experience and capabilities align strongly with this role, we are open to discussing a package that reflects the value they bring. Given the importance of this hire, we are committed to investing appropriately in the person best placed to help us achieve our mission.

If you’re excited about this role but don’t meet every requirement, that’s okay; we still encourage you to apply. We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Our Values

• Empathy – Kindness and compassion are at the heart of everything we do.
• Play – Play sharpens focus. It keeps us curious, fast and obsessed with the craft.
• Never Settle – A relentless ambition, bias toward action, and uncomfortable levels of curiosity.
• Tenacity – Tenacious under pressure, we assume chaos and stay in motion to adapt and progress.
• Unity – Different minds. Shared mission. No passengers.

Let’s build the future together.