Senior Robotics Engineer, Controls

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Role

Join a small defense technology team building autonomous directed-energy systems. As a senior individual contributor, you will own the precision motion controls stack, from system modeling and state estimation through real-time implementation and field validation.

What You'll Do

• Architect and tune precision pointing and tracking control loops for closed-loop operation at hundreds of hertz.

• Integrate sensor inputs and actuator commands, using state estimation to fuse IMU, encoder, and vision feedback.

• Identify and model gimbal, mount, and actuator dynamics, then tune actuators and compensate for nonlinearities such as backlash, friction, and saturation.

• Characterize structural resonances and develop filtering and compensation approaches.

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

• Conduct field characterization, document control designs, and establish tuning standards.

What We're Looking For

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

• Strong grounding in classical and state-space controls, including LQR and MPC, plus practical state estimation using Kalman-family or complementary filters.

• Experience with system identification, frequency-domain tuning, and structural resonance characterization.

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

• Experience with servo drives, brushless motors, encoders, and IMUs, and an understanding of latency and jitter in real-time systems.

• Comfort working across mechanical, electrical, and software engineering, and validating controls on actual hardware.

• Experience with gimbals, precision pointing, moving platforms, or target tracking is useful.

Compensation & Benefits

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

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California, with range days.