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 applied autonomy on real hardware: solid control, dependable multi-vehicle coordination, and safe behavior when something fails. A quarter-scale prototype is already running, and our next major milestone, targeted for early next year, is a full-scale demonstration of the team lifting and moving a payload together. You will be writing, tuning, and field testing on hardware from your first weeks.
As the first dedicated autonomy hire on a small engineering team, you will own the full scope of autonomy, define your validation and build requirements, and work them through with the mechanical and electrical engineers who build the vehicles. This role is for someone who wants to build, test, and iterate, not stay in theory or simulation.
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. We closed our pre-seed round this spring, opened our first facility in the summer, and had a working quarter-scale prototype running within six weeks. Our founding team has designed and built launch vehicles, crewed spacecraft, 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, construction, 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
- Develop coordination strategies that let a team of vehicles share a load and stay in sync, including over lossy or intermittent communication links
- 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
- 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, spend real time with the vehicles during testing, and iterate on what the data shows
- Write clear autonomy validation and build requirements and communicate them to the rest of the team
- 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 hands-on controls and/or autonomy experience on robots or vehicles that ran in the field, beyond simulation; a PhD with applied, hardware-based robotics research and strong industry internships is also a fit
- Experience with multi-agent, swarm, or collaborative robotics, where multiple robots work together on a shared task, ideally over degraded or intermittent communications
- 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
- 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
- A track record of owning a large share of a project on a small team and moving fast in an iterative hardware environment
- Based in or willing to relocate to the Long Beach area and work fully on-site
- 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
- Small-team or early-stage startup experience where you owned the outcome
- Genuine interest in human spaceflight and building a lasting human presence beyond Earth
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
- Be the first autonomy engineer, with the team set to grow after our next funding round
- 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 base salary + meaningful early-stage equity, with a planned salary increase at our next funding round