Senior Staff Software Engineer, Motion Planning

About The Role

Our autonomy team is growing, and we are looking for an experienced technical leader to set the direction for motion planning on our humanoid robots. In this role you will own the technical roadmap for collision-free motion planning across whole-body motion, manipulation, grasping, and loco-manipulation. You will partner closely with our state estimation, navigation, controls, and behaviors teams to architect a planning stack that solves the hardest problems in real-world deployment: high degrees of freedom, dynamic constraints, environmental uncertainty, and reliability at scale.

About The Work

• Own and drive the technical roadmap for collision-free motion planning across whole-body motion, manipulation, grasping, and loco-manipulation
• Design, implement, test, and deploy motion planning and trajectory optimization algorithms for humanoid robots
• Architect motion planning systems for modularity, observability, and clean integration with perception, state estimation, and control
• Develop algorithms robust to environmental uncertainty and imperfect state estimation
• Lead cross-team architectural decisions and collaborate with autonomy, controls, and behaviors teams to solve complex system-level problems

About You

• Experience developing and deploying manipulation algorithms on high-DOF robots
• Industry experience deploying mobile manipulation robots in real-world commercial applications
• Proven expertise in sample-based motion planning, trajectory optimization, and model predictive control (MPC) with a track record of shipping these algorithms to production
• Expertise developing planning and optimization algorithms subject to geometric and kinodynamic constraints, including contact, friction, and collision
• Deep mathematical fundamentals in search and numerical optimization, including convex and non-convex problem formulation
• Expertise in modern C++ (C++17/20) and Python for high-performance, multithreaded, real-time robotics applications
• Track record architecting large-scale autonomy systems and defining clean interfaces across perception, estimation, planning, and control
• Demonstrated technical leadership: setting direction for complex robotics systems, owning architecture, and mentoring senior engineers

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience working with humanoid (or similar) robots
• Experience with loco-manipulation: combined planning of locomotion and manipulation
• Experience with whole-body model predictive control or whole-body trajectory optimization
• Experience with task and motion planning (TAMP) under uncertainty
• Experience leveraging machine learning or offline trajectory optimization to accelerate online planning
• Experience with perception and scene understanding as it pertains to motion planning
• Publications in top robotics venues (RSS, ICRA, IROS, etc.)