Robotics Engineer — Vehicle Control & Motion Planning
Full-time
San Francisco, CA, USA
Posted on Sep 30, 2026
Our work
We are a well capitalized stealth VC-backed startup building a new type of spatial AI capable of universally solving autonomy. We innovate at the foundational layer of AI by training our own AI models.
Our team
Our team is composed of AI pioneers and leaders from Google X, Google Brain, and Space Agencies. Several of us are repeat founders, with deep commercialization insights across multiple enterprise segments. We enjoy long, deep ideations around entirely unexplored AI use cases in autonomy (cars, drones, robots).
Location
San Francisco or San Diego (on-site). Active Field Testing
Technical Skills
- Controls: You have put a controller on a physical vehicle that could hurt someone and lived with the result. State feedback, trajectory tracking, real intuition for actuator limits and latency.
- Vehicle Dynamics: Modelling on loose and uneven surfaces, and a clear sense of where the model stops being true.
- Motion Planning: Local planning and obstacle avoidance on terrain that was never mapped.
- Safety: Designing the envelope — what the vehicle does when it loses localisation, comms or traction.
- Programming: Strong C++, comfortable in Python.
- Robotics: ROS 2 useful, not required. Comma / openpilot, drive-by-wire, or CAN integration a plus.
- Domain-Specific: Off-road, agricultural, defence or motorsport ground vehicles. Bonus if you own something with a motor that you have modified.