Founding Controls & Autonomy Engineer - Teach a Team of Heavy-Lift Robots to Move as One
Long Beach, California | On-site
Opportunity Summary
We are looking for a founding controls and autonomy engineer to own the control stack on our flagship robotic vehicle. Our tracked robots operate in groups of four: they drive up to a large payload, lift it together, and carry it across uneven terrain, much like a crew of people moving a heavy piece of furniture. The core challenge is coordination. Each vehicle has to sense, decide, and act in concert with its teammates so the group moves the load smoothly without fighting itself, even when the link between vehicles drops out.
This is not full self-driving, and a human can stay in the loop. What matters is solid control on real hardware, dependable multi-vehicle coordination, and safe behavior when something fails. A quarter-scale prototype is already built and a full-scale demonstrator is planned for early next year, so you will be writing, tuning, and field testing on hardware from your first weeks.
About Us
We are a pre-seed, venture-backed space infrastructure startup building the hardware needed for a permanent human presence beyond Earth, starting with heavy logistics and pressurized structures for the lunar surface. Our founding team has designed and built launch vehicles, landers, and space habitats at leading commercial space companies, and includes U.S. military experience. The cooperative robots we are developing for space also solve hard problems on Earth in defense and industrial logistics, and we are already in early partnership discussions with NASA and U.S. defense stakeholders.
Job Duties
- Own the vehicle control and autonomy stack, from low-level loops up to coordinated multi-vehicle behavior
- Design and tune control loops, state estimators, and stability margins for a plant whose dynamics shift with payload
- Implement force, impedance, or admittance control to manage contact loads as vehicles share and carry a payload
- Build perception, localization, and path planning for mobile robots, with LiDAR as a core sensor
- Develop coordination strategies that keep a team of vehicles in sync over lossy or intermittent communication links
- Characterize real mechanisms through system identification and design controllers around measured behavior
- Define fault detection, safe-state responses, and fail-safe logic suited to multi-ton loads
- Move algorithms from simulation onto hardware and into field tests, then iterate on what the data shows
- Partner with electrical and mechanical teammates on sensors, actuators, compute, networking, and timing
- Use frontier AI models as part of your everyday design, build, and test workflow
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Mechanical, Electrical, Aerospace, or Robotics Engineering or a related field
- 5+ years of controls and/or autonomy experience on robots or vehicles that ran in the field, beyond simulation
- Deep controls fundamentals, including loop design, state estimation, and stability analysis on systems with variable loads
- Hardware experience with force, impedance, or admittance control
- Perception and planning experience for mobile robots, including LiDAR-based autonomy
- Experience coordinating multiple robots, ideally over degraded or intermittent communications
- System identification on physical hardware, designing to what you measured rather than what you assumed
- Fail-safe design experience, including fault detection and safe-state behavior
- U.S. person (U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, or protected individual) as defined under ITAR
Preferred Experience
- SLAM or localization in dark, featureless, or GPS-denied environments
- Time synchronization and distributed coordination across vehicles
- ROS 2 and DDS, especially over unreliable networks
- FMEA, fault tree analysis, or other safety-critical systems work
- Working knowledge of robotics foundation models such as VLAs and diffusion policies, with sound judgment on where they belong in a fielded system
- Teleoperation or control of systems with significant communication latency
- Time at a space, defense, motorsport, or other fast-iteration hardware company
- Early-stage startup experience
Why Join Us
- Own a rare cooperative multi-robot manipulation problem from the ground up as a founding engineer
- Your code runs on real hardware right away, with a working prototype now and a full-scale demonstrator next
- Human-in-the-loop autonomy focused on control and coordination rather than full self-driving
- Work directly with founders who have built and flown hardware at leading commercial space companies
- Dual-use technology with paths into lunar exploration, defense, and industrial logistics
- Meaningful early-stage equity in a company with a long-term, mission-driven vision
Compensation Details
$150,000 - $180,000 + equity