Senior Robotics Engineer, Controls

ABOUT THE ROLE Join a small engineering team at a defense technology company developing autonomous systems to counter drone threats. As a senior individual contributor, you will own the precision motion control stack, from control architecture and state estimation to hardware testing and field characterization. WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Design and tune precision pointing and tracking control loops, including closed-loop control from sensor input to actuator command.
• Build state estimation and sensor fusion across IMUs, encoders, and vision feedback.
• Identify and model gimbal, mount, and actuator dynamics, then compensate for resonance, backlash, friction, saturation, and other nonlinearities.
• Develop simulation and hardware-in-the-loop infrastructure to validate controls and reduce the sim-to-real gap.
• Characterize system performance on hardware and during field testing, and document control designs and tuning standards. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
• At least 4 years of robotics experience, including designing and tuning closed-loop controllers on physical motion hardware.
• Strong grounding in classical and state-space control, including LQR and MPC, with experience applying these methods to real systems.
• Hands-on state estimation and sensor fusion experience using Kalman, EKF, UKF, or complementary filters.
• Experience with system identification, frequency-domain tuning, resonance compensation, and managing latency and jitter in real-time loops.
• Modern C++ for real-time control, plus Python or MATLAB/Simulink for modeling and analysis.
• Familiarity with servo drives, brushless motors, encoders, and IMUs, and the ability to work across mechanical, electrical, and software disciplines.
• Experience building control simulations and validating them against hardware. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Base salary: $180,000 to $200,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available. LOCATION On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.