Controls Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Company

The datacenter buildout is the largest industrial project in human history. Gradient builds the autonomous robots that make it possible.

Partnered with the world's largest AI infrastructure companies and backed by the industry's best investors, we move fast and build full-stack systems that matter.

About the role

We're looking for a Controls Engineer to own motion from command to actuator. You'll design and tune the control loops that let our machines do sub-millimeter precision work under real load: motor control, trajectory execution, force and impedance control, and the sensor feedback that closes every loop. You'll work tightly with mechanical, electrical, and software to make the whole machine behave as one deterministic system. We iterate fast (multiple robot generations in months, not years), so the controllers you build land on real hardware doing real precision work almost immediately.

Responsibilities

• Own the control stack: design, implement, and tune motor control, trajectory execution, and high-rate feedback loops on real robots

• Own precision motion: deliver repeatable, sub-millimeter positioning under significant loads, and diagnose the mechanical, electrical, and software sources of error that get in the way

• Own force and contact control: develop force/impedance control strategies for tasks where the robot touches, inserts, and manipulates delicate hardware

• Own actuator and sensor integration: bring up motors, drives, encoders, and force/torque sensors, and characterize their real-world behavior

• Partner across the stack: work with mechanical on drivetrain and stiffness trade-offs, electrical on drives and instrumentation, and software on the real-time interfaces your controllers run on

• Validate and iterate fast: build test procedures that prove controller performance, and turn a failed test into a tuned revision the same week

Minimum Qualifications

• 3+ years of controls engineering experience on real electromechanical systems (robotics, motion systems, automation, or similar)

• Strong control theory fundamentals: PID and beyond, system identification, stability analysis, and the judgment to know when simple control is the right answer

• Hands-on experience tuning motor control and closed-loop motion systems on physical hardware, not just in simulation

• Proficiency in C++ or Rust for real-time control code, plus Python for analysis and tooling

• Debugged control problems in the wild: instability, resonance, latency, sensor noise, and mechanical compliance

• Comfort with ambiguity and a strong build-and-test instinct

• Able to work on-site in San Francisco 5 days/week (6 days/week if needed during crunch time), embedded in the team

Preferred Qualifications

• Force/impedance control or contact-rich manipulation experience

• Industrial fieldbus and drive experience: EtherCAT, CANopen, servo drive commissioning

• Experience with precision motion systems: linear stages, ball screws, direct drive, or similar

• Familiarity with real-time Linux and deterministic execution

• Comfort using AI tools to multiply your own output