Research Engineer, Robotics - Roboticist

The role

You will own the control stack on physical robots and the path from simulation to them. This involves tuning real-time control on arms, hands, and humanoids, and designing hardware for research. You will work with research scientists and the simulation team to ensure learned policies work on hardware.

What you will do

• Build and own the real-time control stack across embodiments
• Bring up, tune and stabilize whole-body controllers for humanoids and bimanual systems
• Lead the setup, calibration, maintenance and tuning of robots
• Diagnose stability, latency and contact problems across hardware, firmware, control and learned policy
• Design and build hardware like end-effectors, fingertips, sensor mounts, fixtures and test rigs
• Build the runtime and tooling around the robots including teleoperation and data collection
• Contribute to open-source releases and publications

Required qualifications

• Master’s with 3+ years of experience, or PhD, in robotics, control or a related field
• Bachelor’s and 3+ years of industry experience also considered
• Implemented and tuned real-time controllers on physical robots
• Solid grounding in rigid-body dynamics, control theory, stability analysis and system identification
• Understanding of floating-base dynamics, contact constraints and inverse dynamics
• Experience with QP-based whole-body control, operational-space control or MPC
• Substantial hands-on experience with real-robot manipulation
• Designed robot software systems end to end
• Strong Python
• Solid real-time C++
• Designed and built hardware used on a real robot
• CAD required (SolidWorks, Fusion 360, Onshape or similar)

Nice to have

• Humanoid whole-body control on hardware
• Experience with Unitree platforms (G1, H1 or similar)
• Depth in control theory (Lyapunov, passivity-based, etc.)
• Sim-to-real for whole-body policies
• Whole-body state estimation and sensor fusion
• Experience with bimanual systems, multi-fingered hands or tactile sensing
• Teleoperation systems
• Robotics middleware and infrastructure (ROS 2, DDS or Zenoh, real-time Linux, containerization, CI/CD)
• Hand-eye and multi-camera calibration, depth sensing and 3D perception on hardware
• Open-source contributions or publications at robotics venues

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, basic life insurance, basic accidental death and dismemberment insurance, short-term disability, long-term disability, and an employee assistance program
• Voluntary life insurance, voluntary accidental death and dismemberment, health savings account, healthcare reimbursement arrangement, and health care and dependent care flexible spending account plans
• 401k plan
• $125 per month to assist with commuting or internet expenses
• $200 per month for fitness and wellbeing expenses
• Up to ten sick days per year
• Up to seven personal days per year
• Up to 20 vacation days per year
• Twelve paid holidays
• Annual bonuses
• Participation in the long-term incentive plan

Before you apply

• Welcome interest from applicants from outside of the United States

About the company

Ai2 is a Seattle based non-profit AI research institute founded in 2014 by the late Paul Allen. Its mission is building breakthrough AI to solve the world’s biggest problems.