{"schemaVersion":"jobsearcher.job.v1","id":"9dfff7a8d777bfc2f40c8ecc","url":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/9dfff7a8d777bfc2f40c8ecc","canonicalUrl":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/9dfff7a8d777bfc2f40c8ecc","title":"Robot Autonomy Engineer","description":"Role Description\n\nWe are looking to recruit an exceptional Robot Autonomy Engineer to build the decision-making stack that turns a goal into coordinated, reliable robot behavior in real industrial applications — what the robot should do next, in what order, and how a fleet of them shares a workspace without getting in each other's way.\n\nIn this role you will:\n\nOwn the autonomy stack above the controller — task planning, behavior planning, path planning and trajectory planning — from the moment work arrives to the trajectories handed off to motion control.\nDesign the behavior architectures that structure long-horizon manipulation and navigation tasks, and that degrade into retry, recovery and operator handoff rather than into a stall.\nBring principled task planning to industrial workflows: goal and precedence reasoning, task allocation, and planning under uncertainty.\nPlan and coordinate motion for multiple robots sharing an industrial facility — separation, reservation, deconfliction and deadlock-free repositioning — so that adding a robot adds throughput.\nIntegrate LLM and VLM reasoning into planning for task decomposition, subtask grounding and language-conditioned goals, together with the verification and fallbacks that make a model's output safe to execute on real hardware.\nDefine the contract between learned policies and classical planning: what the model may decide, what the planner must guarantee, and how the two hand off mid-task.\nInterface with perception, intelligence, controls, simulation and platform software in designing functional architectures that hold up under real-world operation.\nHold the whole stack to measurable field performance — cycle time, success rate, intervention rate — through simulation, replay of recorded robot logs, and testing on real robots.\nQualifications\n\nMust-have:\n\nMS or PhD in robotics, engineering, mathematics, computer science or a related discipline.\nReal-world experience in classical motion planning for one or more robots — search-based, sampling-based or optimization-based (A*, RRT/PRM, trajectory optimization, model predictive control) — carried onto hardware rather than left in simulation.\nReal-world experience in behavior planning: finite state machines, behavior trees or comparable behavior architectures for long-horizon tasks, including failure detection and recovery.\nFamiliarity with task planning in the classical AI planning sense (STRIPS, PDDL, HTN) or decision-theoretic planning (MDP, POMDP), and the judgment to know when that machinery earns its complexity against a simpler reactive design.\nProficiency in Python and C++ programming, using up-to-date software development practices and tooling.\nSelf-starter attitude with strong ability to identify problems, prioritize them, then plan and execute working solutions.\nEnthusiasm for working in a fast paced startup environment and eagerness to support the team on a variety of topics.\n\nNice-to-have:\n\nPractical experience fine-tuning and integrating LLMs or VLMs for task planning, including grounding model output in executable, verifiable plans.\nMulti-robot coordination at fleet scale: task allocation and assignment, traffic management, deconfliction, multi-agent path finding.\nExperience with mobile manipulation — coordinating a mobile base and one or more arms toward a single task.\nFamiliarity with ROS 2, and with fleet interface standards such as VDA5050.\nFamiliarity with planning and kinematics libraries such as Drake, OMPL or MoveIt.\nExperience evaluating planners in simulation and against replayed field logs, and the regression testing that keeps a planner honest as it changes.\nA track record of carrying autonomy from working demo to sustained field operation.\nFamiliarity with functional safety (FuSa) concepts.","company":"Maven Robotics","rawCompany":"maven robotics","city":"Alameda","state":"CA","isRemote":false,"isActive":false,"createdAt":"2026-08-24T09:07:24.798Z","occupations":[{"code":"17-2199.08","title":"Robotics Engineers","slug":"robotics-engineers"},{"code":"17-3024.01","title":"Robotics Technicians","slug":"robotics-technicians"},{"code":"17-2199.05","title":"Mechatronics Engineers","slug":"mechatronics-engineers"}],"industries":[{"code":"333248","title":"All Other Industrial Machinery Manufacturing","slug":"all-other-industrial-machinery-manufacturing"},{"code":"541715","title":"Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences (except Nanotechnology and Biotechnology)","slug":"research-and-development-in-the-physical-engineering-and-life-sciences-except-nanotechnology-and-biotechnology"},{"code":"541330","title":"Engineering Services","slug":"engineering-services"}],"jobPosting":{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"JobPosting","title":"Robot Autonomy Engineer","description":"Role Description\n\nWe are looking to recruit an exceptional Robot Autonomy Engineer to build the decision-making stack that turns a goal into coordinated, reliable robot behavior in real industrial applications — what the robot should do next, in what order, and how a fleet of them shares a workspace without getting in each other's way.\n\nIn this role you will:\n\nOwn the autonomy stack above the controller — task planning, behavior planning, path planning and trajectory planning — from the moment work arrives to the trajectories handed off to motion control.\nDesign the behavior architectures that structure long-horizon manipulation and navigation tasks, and that degrade into retry, recovery and operator handoff rather than into a stall.\nBring principled task planning to industrial workflows: goal and precedence reasoning, task allocation, and planning under uncertainty.\nPlan and coordinate motion for multiple robots sharing an industrial facility — separation, reservation, deconfliction and deadlock-free repositioning — so that adding a robot adds throughput.\nIntegrate LLM and VLM reasoning into planning for task decomposition, subtask grounding and language-conditioned goals, together with the verification and fallbacks that make a model's output safe to execute on real hardware.\nDefine the contract between learned policies and classical planning: what the model may decide, what the planner must guarantee, and how the two hand off mid-task.\nInterface with perception, intelligence, controls, simulation and platform software in designing functional architectures that hold up under real-world operation.\nHold the whole stack to measurable field performance — cycle time, success rate, intervention rate — through simulation, replay of recorded robot logs, and testing on real robots.\nQualifications\n\nMust-have:\n\nMS or PhD in robotics, engineering, mathematics, computer science or a related discipline.\nReal-world experience in classical motion planning for one or more robots — search-based, sampling-based or optimization-based (A*, RRT/PRM, trajectory optimization, model predictive control) — carried onto hardware rather than left in simulation.\nReal-world experience in behavior planning: finite state machines, behavior trees or comparable behavior architectures for long-horizon tasks, including failure detection and recovery.\nFamiliarity with task planning in the classical AI planning sense (STRIPS, PDDL, HTN) or decision-theoretic planning (MDP, POMDP), and the judgment to know when that machinery earns its complexity against a simpler reactive design.\nProficiency in Python and C++ programming, using up-to-date software development practices and tooling.\nSelf-starter attitude with strong ability to identify problems, prioritize them, then plan and execute working solutions.\nEnthusiasm for working in a fast paced startup environment and eagerness to support the team on a variety of topics.\n\nNice-to-have:\n\nPractical experience fine-tuning and integrating LLMs or VLMs for task planning, including grounding model output in executable, verifiable plans.\nMulti-robot coordination at fleet scale: task allocation and assignment, traffic management, deconfliction, multi-agent path finding.\nExperience with mobile manipulation — coordinating a mobile base and one or more arms toward a single task.\nFamiliarity with ROS 2, and with fleet interface standards such as VDA5050.\nFamiliarity with planning and kinematics libraries such as Drake, OMPL or MoveIt.\nExperience evaluating planners in simulation and against replayed field logs, and the regression testing that keeps a planner honest as it changes.\nA track record of carrying autonomy from working demo to sustained field operation.\nFamiliarity with functional safety (FuSa) concepts.","datePosted":"2026-08-24T09:07:24.798Z","dateModified":"2026-08-24T09:07:24.798Z","hiringOrganization":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Maven Robotics","sameAs":"https://jobsearcher.com"},"jobLocation":{"@type":"Place","address":{"@type":"PostalAddress","addressLocality":"Alameda","addressRegion":"CA","addressCountry":"US"}},"identifier":{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"JobSearcher","value":"9dfff7a8d777bfc2f40c8ecc"},"url":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/9dfff7a8d777bfc2f40c8ecc"}}