Staff Software Engineer, Humanoid Whole-Body Controls
Human-centered robotics company building AI-powered humanoid robots for manufacturing and logistics, Bay Area
| Employer | Human-centered robotics company building AI-powered humanoid robots for manufacturing and logistics, Bay Area (not named) |
|---|---|
| Location | Sunnyvale, CA (Bay Area) · On-site |
| Type & level | Full-time · Staff |
| Pay | USD 300k–350k annual compensation Source: pay range stated in the source posting |
| Visa path | O-1A fit (senior candidates) |
| Role family | Humanoid Robotics Engineer |
About the role
This staff role sits on the motion control and planning team and covers whole-body control for both a wheeled-base robot and a biped. The engineer moves to the hardest problems, from learning-based hand control to mobile manipulation and teleoperation, and sets technical direction for the controls stack. The aim is to expand robot speed, payload, reliability and safety.
What you'll do
- Raise the quality of the controls stack across architecture, algorithms, real-time performance and testing.
- Advance whole-body control, coordinating the base or legs with upper-body manipulation.
- Move to the highest-impact problems such as reinforcement learning for hands, mobile manipulation, teleoperation and estimation.
- Turn model-based and learning-based methods into robust capability from simulation through hardware deployment.
- Set technical direction and influence the roadmap across locomotion, manipulation, teleoperation, RL and estimation teams.
- Mentor engineers through design and code reviews, and collaborate with hardware, systems and RL teams.
Requirements
- Deep grounding in kinematics, dynamics, state estimation and optimization and control theory.
- Proven whole-body control expertise (WBC, QP-based control or MPC) for legged or wheeled systems.
- Hands-on reinforcement learning for robotics, trained in simulation.
- Strong real-time C++ and Python.
- Industry experience building production controllers and validating them on physical robots.
- MS or PhD in a related field (or equivalent experience) with 8+ years of industry experience, or 4+ with a PhD.
Nice to have
- Shipping controllers to a production fleet at scale
- Dexterous or in-hand manipulation
- Legged locomotion
- Safety-critical or certified software (ISO 13849, ISO 10218, IEC 61508)
Pay & benefits
USD 300k–350k annual compensation. The posting does not list benefits beyond the stated annual compensation.
Pay source: pay range stated in the source posting. Market data, not an offer from O1DMatch.
Visa path
Senior controls engineers often document O-1A eligibility through publications, patents, high compensation, peer review, and leadership of critical systems that reached hardware. The posting states no citizenship restriction. An employer like this, or a U.S. agent, can file an O-1A petition if the candidate's evidence qualifies; approval is not assured.
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