Engineering Manager - Controls

Description

The company builds AI-powered humanoid robots for people to work alongside, starting with manufacturing and logistics and later extending into healthcare, the home and other settings. Its main robot is Apollo, and the company is taking it to market at scale, working on problems such as safety, commercialization and mass production.

The team owns the real-time control software that runs on these robots. This is a people-management role, with responsibility for hiring and developing engineers, delivering the team's part of the wider Controls roadmap, and keeping the control stack reliable, well tested and ready for production.

You will manage the team while staying hands-on enough to review designs and unblock engineers. You will work closely with the firmware, embedded software, learning, teleoperation and test teams to move new capabilities from simulation onto the robot fleet.

This is a direct hire position. Agency solicitations are not accepted.

Responsibilities

• Oversee development of the real-time control framework on the robot, covering robot drivers, state estimation, control interfaces, and integration of learned policies and teleoperation.
• Plan the team's deliverables with the other leads in the Controls roadmap. Split program goals into concrete work, track progress against milestones, and flag schedule or quality risks early.
• Hire, manage and mentor controls and software engineers. Set clear priorities and ownership, give regular feedback, and grow engineers and tech leads into stronger technical contributors.
• Keep code quality high through design reviews, code reviews and automated tests, including simulation and hardware-in-the-loop regression tests. Own the team's share of the software release process and the stability of what ships to the fleet.
• Keep the control software and tooling quick to use, so engineers can test new approaches to hard robotics problems in simulation and on hardware.
• Make sure the control stack behaves the same in simulation and on hardware. Support robot bring-up, calibration tooling, and root-cause analysis of issues found in testing and in the field.
• Work with the firmware, embedded software, learning, teleoperation, systems and test teams to agree on interfaces, priorities and schedules, and represent the team in stakeholder reviews.

Requirements

• Strong grounding in robot kinematics, dynamics and control, with hands-on work in areas such as whole-body control, manipulation or teleoperation.
• Experience building or leading real-time robotic software in C++, including multi-threaded execution, timing and hardware interfaces.
• A record of moving control software from simulation onto physical robots and supporting it through testing and deployment.
• Experience managing or leading engineers, including hiring, mentoring, performance feedback and setting priorities.
• Experience planning and shipping software in a fast-moving R&D setting, balancing near-term deliverables with long-term code health.
• Experience with humanoid, legged or mobile manipulation platforms is a plus.
• Experience with state estimation and system identification for robotic systems is a plus.
• Experience integrating reinforcement learning or other learned policies into a real-time control stack is a plus.
• Experience with physics engines such as MuJoCo, IsaacSim or Drake is a plus.
• Experience with hardware-in-the-loop testing, continuous integration and release processes for robotics software is a plus.
• Familiarity with ROS 2 or similar robotics middleware is a plus.
• An MS or PhD in robotics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science or a related field.
• 4+ years of relevant industry experience in robot controls or robotics software, including 1+ year managing engineers and 2+ years as a technical lead. A PhD can replace 2 of the 4 years, leaving 2+ years of experience.

Conditions

Mostly desk work at a computer for long stretches.

Occasionally lift up to 15 pounds.

Read printed material and screens, and communicate verbally.

Equal opportunity applies; one sentence on this would be fine.