- Robot type
- Industrial Automation
- Location
- MilpitasCaliforniaUSA
- Job type
- Software
- Posted
- Jan 19, 2026
- Salary
- $160,000–$265,000 a year
Full-time
Senior / Staff Robotics Engineer, Motion Planning
Job description
We are seeking a Senior / Staff Robotics Engineer, Motion Planning to own the local mobility and safety stack for our fleet. In this role, you will bridge the gap between AI-driven perception and physical hardware execution. You will consume traversability and semantic costmaps generated by our AI team and translate them into safe, dynamically feasible, and deterministic motion. You are solving the physics of mobility on unpredictable terrain, ensuring our humanoid platform respects its physical limits, shifting center of mass, and traction constraints.
RoboForce is an AI robotics company developing Physical AI–powered Robo-Labor for dull, dirty, and dangerous work.
Job responsibilities
- Dynamic Motion Planning: Architect and implement advanced local planners (e.g., optimization-based approaches like MPC, MPPI, or custom contouring control) that translate AI-generated routes into trajectories that a…
- AI Integration & Costmap Consumption: Build the high-performance C++ pipelines that ingest the AI team's neural network outputs (semantic maps, learned costmaps) in real-time and convert them into deterministic…
- Center of Mass (CoM) Aware Navigation: Ensure local planners dynamically adjust to real-time changes in the robot's Center of Mass caused by the lifting column and dual-arm payloads.
- Deterministic Safety Architectures: AI models hallucinate. You will build the deterministic C++ safety layer and fallback behaviors that override AI inputs if a commanded path violates physical safety constraints or if…
- WBC Integration: Architect the local planning interfaces to seamlessly pass base trajectories, velocity limits, and dynamic constraints to our upcoming Whole-Body Control (WBC) architecture, bridging the gap between…
Job requirements
- Education: Ph.D. in Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field, OR an M.S. degree with 4+ years of relevant industry experience.
- Motion Planning Expertise: Deep hands-on experience developing and tuning advanced local planners and trajectory optimization algorithms for mobile robots in complex, unstructured environments.
- Rigid Body Dynamics: Strong understanding of kinematics, vehicle dynamics, and center-of-mass constraints for top-heavy mobile robots operating on uneven outdoor terrain.
- C++ Performance Engineering: Expertise in modern C++ (C++17/20), with strict attention to real-time performance, memory management, and low-latency execution.
- Field Deployment: Proven track record of building and deploying autonomous navigation stacks on real, physical robotic platforms in the wild.
- Requires 5 days/week in-office collaboration with the teams.
- WBC / Manipulation: Familiarity with Whole-Body Control frameworks, operational space control, and how mobile bases synchronize with high-DOF manipulators.
- Applied SLAM / State Estimation: Experience tuning, debugging, or filtering outputs from commercial SLAM/VIO systems when they fail in visually degraded environments.