Senior Robotics Engineer, Controls

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Role

Join a small engineering team at a defense technology company developing autonomous systems to counter drone threats. As a senior individual contributor, you will own the precision motion control stack, from control architecture and state estimation to hardware testing and field characterization.

What You'll Do

• Design and tune precision pointing and tracking control loops, including closed-loop control from sensor input to actuator command.

• Build state estimation and sensor fusion across IMUs, encoders, and vision feedback.

• Identify and model gimbal, mount, and actuator dynamics, then compensate for resonance, backlash, friction, saturation, and other nonlinearities.

• Develop simulation and hardware-in-the-loop infrastructure to validate controls and reduce the sim-to-real gap.

• Characterize system performance on hardware and during field testing, and document control designs and tuning standards.

What We're Looking For

• At least 4 years of robotics experience, including designing and tuning closed-loop controllers on physical motion hardware.

• Strong grounding in classical and state-space control, including LQR and MPC, with experience applying these methods to real systems.

• Hands-on state estimation and sensor fusion experience using Kalman, EKF, UKF, or complementary filters.

• Experience with system identification, frequency-domain tuning, resonance compensation, and managing latency and jitter in real-time loops.

• Modern C++ for real-time control, plus Python or MATLAB/Simulink for modeling and analysis.

• Familiarity with servo drives, brushless motors, encoders, and IMUs, and the ability to work across mechanical, electrical, and software disciplines.

• Experience building control simulations and validating them against hardware.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $180,000 to $200,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.