Locomotion & Whole-Body Control Engineer

We are building the control intelligence that enables our humanoid robot 4NE1 to move, balance, manipulate, and interact safely in complex real-world environments. We are looking for a Locomotion & Whole-Body Control Engineer to join our Humanoid Controls team in Zurich and develop the core algorithms that power dynamic locomotion and whole-body behavior on the physical robot.

This role spans the key layers of the humanoid control stack, from trajectory optimization and model predictive control (MPC) for motion generation to whole-body control (WBC) for executing those motions reliably on real hardware at high control frequencies.

You will work on contact-rich humanoid dynamics, real-time optimization, and robust control deployment, collaborating closely with state estimation, simulation, low-level controls, hardware, and AI teams to enable stable and adaptable humanoid behavior in practical applications.

Your mission & challenges

• Develop whole-body motion generation and control algorithms for the 4NE1 humanoid, including locomotion, balancing, contact transitions, and loco-manipulation tasks.

• Design and implement trajectory optimization and MPC pipelines for humanoid motion generation, considering robot state, contact schedules, ground reaction forces, centroidal momentum, and joint trajectories.

• Build and maintain QP-based whole-body control and task-space inverse dynamics frameworks to execute planned motions on the physical robot at frequencies up to 1 kHz.

• Develop and improve dynamic models of the humanoid system, including floating-base rigid-body dynamics, forward and inverse kinematics, Jacobians, and full-body dynamics computation.

• Formulate and implement kinematic, dynamic, contact, friction, torque, stability, and joint-limit constraints across planning and control layers.

• Improve solver performance, numerical robustness, and real-time reliability of optimization pipelines deployed on hardware.

• Deploy, tune, and validate locomotion and whole-body control algorithms on physical humanoid robots, including debugging hardware-specific effects, contact models, and control performance.

• Develop high-performance C++ software for real-time control systems and build Python-based tooling for analysis, testing, and prototyping.

• Collaborate closely with engineers across controls, hardware, simulation, perception, AI, and systems teams to deliver integrated humanoid capabilities.