Staff Robotics Software Engineer, Robot Behaviors

About the Role

We are looking for a Staff Robotics Software Engineer (Tech Lead) to lead the design and development of robot behaviors that expand and generalize our humanoid robot’s capabilities. In this role, you will own behavior design end-to-end, from high-level task logic and system design down to on-robot validation and deployment. You will work at the intersection of behavior planning, motion planning, object perception, and manipulation, developing new autonomy capabilities and pushing the robot into new classes of tasks. We are looking for a hands-on technical leader who can set technical direction and wants to stay close to the robot: writing code, running experiments, debugging logs, working with hardware, and mentoring other engineers by building alongside them.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the design, implementation, and validation of complex humanoid robot behaviors.
• Lead behavior planning and execution design, including task decomposition, control flow, recovery, and failure handling.
• Build new autonomy capabilities that expand what the robot can reliably do in the real world.
• Develop and evaluate manipulation strategies for new tasks, objects, workflows, and customer environments.
• Integrate robot behaviors with motion planning, controls, object perception, estimation, and hardware systems.
• Train, evaluate, and integrate learned policies into hybrid learned/classical execution workflows.
• Integrate new end effectors, tools, sensors, and other hardware capabilities into the behavior stack.
• Debug complex system-level failures using logs, replay, metrics, simulation, and on-robot experimentation.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, debugging, and hands-on technical guidance.
• Help set technical direction and best practices for building robust, composable, reusable, and generalizable robot behaviors.

About You

• B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Robotics, Computer Science, or a related engineering field.
• 8+ years of professional experience developing robotics software, autonomy systems, robot behaviors, or related real-world robotic capabilities.
• Demonstrated experience as a tech lead or senior technical owner for complex robotics projects.
• Proficient in Python and C++, and comfortable contributing to large, long-lived codebases.
• Experience with behavior trees, state machines, task planners, hierarchical planning, or similar behavior-planning frameworks.
• Strong system-level understanding of how motion planning, object perception, controls, estimation, and hardware interact on real robots.
• Experience working with complex algorithms and data pipelines, with an ability to optimize for performance, robustness, and scalability.
• Experience collaborating closely with perception, planning, controls, hardware, product, or field teams.
• Strong ownership mindset with a focus on robustness, generalization, and real-world reliability.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience developing manipulation strategies for complex or unstructured environments.
• Experience with learned robot skills, including imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or hybrid learned/classical execution strategies.
• Experience deploying and supporting autonomous robots in real customer environments.

This is a hybrid role based out of one of our Salem, OR, Pittsburgh, PA, or Fremont, CA offices.

The final salary offered to a successful candidate will be dependent on several factors that may include but are not limited to: market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. This range may change based on geographical location and may be modified in the future.