Robot Autonomy Engineer
Posted 19 Aug 2026
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Management level
- Individual contributor
Compensation
No salary listed for this role.
Role speciality
Motion PlanningMulti-Robot CoordinationRobot AutonomyTask Planning
Useful technologies
A*C++DrakeMoveItOMPLPRMPythonROS 2RRTVDA5050
Required qualifications
Field of studyComputer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Robotics (or related)
Study levelMaster's or higher
Role Description
We are looking to recruit an exceptional Robot Autonomy Engineer to build the decision-making stack that turns a goal into coordinated, reliable robot behavior in real industrial applications — what the robot should do next, in what order, and how a fleet of them shares a workspace without getting in each other's way.
In this role you will:
- Own the autonomy stack above the controller — task planning, behavior planning, path planning and trajectory planning — from the moment work arrives to the trajectories handed off to motion control.
- Design the behavior architectures that structure long-horizon manipulation and navigation tasks, and that degrade into retry, recovery and operator handoff rather than into a stall.
- Bring principled task planning to industrial workflows: goal and precedence reasoning, task allocation, and planning under uncertainty.
- Plan and coordinate motion for multiple robots sharing an industrial facility — separation, reservation, deconfliction and deadlock-free repositioning — so that adding a robot adds throughput.
- Integrate LLM and VLM reasoning into planning for task decomposition, subtask grounding and language-conditioned goals, together with the verification and fallbacks that make a model's output safe to execute on real hardware.
- Define the contract between learned policies and classical planning: what the model may decide, what the planner must guarantee, and how the two hand off mid-task.
- Interface with perception, intelligence, controls, simulation and platform software in designing functional architectures that hold up under real-world operation.
- Hold the whole stack to measurable field performance — cycle time, success rate, intervention rate — through simulation, replay of recorded robot logs, and testing on real robots.
Qualifications
Must-have:
- MS or PhD in robotics, engineering, mathematics, computer science or a related discipline.
- Real-world experience in classical motion planning for one or more robots — search-based, sampling-based or optimization-based (A*, RRT/PRM, trajectory optimization, model predictive control) — carried onto hardware rather than left in simulation.
- Real-world experience in behavior planning: finite state machines, behavior trees or comparable behavior architectures for long-horizon tasks, including failure detection and recovery.
- Familiarity with task planning in the classical AI planning sense (STRIPS, PDDL, HTN) or decision-theoretic planning (MDP, POMDP), and the judgment to know when that machinery earns its complexity against a simpler reactive design.