Robotics Integration/Controls Engineer (Full-Stack Capable)

Department: Engineering

Location: Northbrook, IL

Employment Type: Contract

About LightSpeed

LightSpeed Build Technologies is revolutionizing the construction industry through AI-powered robotics. Our flagship systems—BRUTE for automated wall panel manufacturing and DEX for on-site collaborative construction—are addressing the global housing crisis by delivering unprecedented speed, precision, and affordability in homebuilding.

We're an early-stage venture, building an automated physical system driven by robotic arms, live sensing, and a real-time software layer that ties the hardware to a customer- facing application and operator dashboard. We're past the idea stage and moving fast toward a working demo.

We need an engineer who can own the seam between the hardware and the software bringing up robot arms and controls, wiring sensors, actuators, and telemetry into a real- time control plane, and writing the glue that lets the rest of the stack drive and observe the cell. We're open to candidates coming at this from either direction: a robotics integration engineer who has worked across the software stack, or a controls / automation engineer with strong real-time integration instincts ready to go deeper on robotics. This is not a front-end design role - visual polish lives with another hire.

What you will work on:

• Bring up and integrate robot arms and the surrounding control system; design and tune motion, tooling, sequencing, and safety logic

• Integrate sensors, actuators, and I/O; build the real-time control/telemetry layer — stream motion and sensor data, model job/device state as explicit state machines, expose a clean API contract for the application and operator console to consume

• Stand up and maintain a simulation environment that mirrors the physical cell, so work can proceed in parallel with hardware and demos never block on a single robot Integrate vision/perception where the task requires it

• Write the supporting software around the robotics and controls — services, scripts, and APIs — and coordinate with the application team against a shared control-plane contract

Required skills:

• We expect a strong fit from either a robotics or a controls/automation background:

• Robotics or industrial controls experience - hands-on bring-up and integration of robot arms (cobots a plus) and/or automated cells, motion control, PLC/industrial automation, sensor and actuator integration, in a real, physical setting

• Real-time integration — comfortable with control loops, I/O, and streaming machine state; modeling device/job state and telemetry (WebSockets/SSE, pub/sub, fieldbus, or equivalent)

• Programming - Python and/or C++ for robotics and integration work; scripting comfort generally

• Enough full-stack ability to build the software around the hardware — APIs, services, a basic data layer (Node/TypeScript and Postgres in our stack, but we care more that you can work across it than that you've used our exact tools)

• Pragmatic, demo-driven, comfortable owning ambiguity in an early-stage build

Strongly preferred / differentiators

• ROS/ROS2-building and debugging real nodes, topics, and control loops

• Simulation frameworks — Isaac Sim, Gazebo, MuJoCo, or similar; experience standing up a sim that meaningfully mirrors real hardware

• AI/ML in robotics - learned policies, imitation/RL, or forward-looking approaches (e.g. VLA-style models)

• Vision/perception - object detection, pose estimation, hand-eye calibration SLAM or other spatial/localization work, especially on mobile platforms

• Functional safety - e-stop logic, safety-rated I/O, risk assessment for automated equipment

Employment Relationship

This position is at-will, meaning either you or the Company may terminate employment at any time, with or without cause or notice.

Equal Opportunity

LightSpeed Build Technologies is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and experiences.