Robotics Engineer

This job is posted for Lightspeed via ParallelRobotics Integration / Controls Engineer (Full-Stack Capable)Location: Onsite, Northbrook, IL (not remote) Start: Immediate Engagement: Contract or contract-to-hire; rate/duration based on experience Confidentiality: NDA required before any project specifics are sharedAbout the roleWe're an early-stage venture building an automated physical system driven by robotic arms, live sensing, and a real-time software layer that ties the hardware to a customer-facing application and operator dashboard. We're past the idea stage and moving fast toward a working demo.We need an engineer who can own the seam between the hardware and the software — bringing up robot arms and controls, wiring sensors, actuators, and telemetry into a real-time control plane, and writing the glue that lets the rest of the stack drive and observe the cell. We're open to candidates coming at this from either direction: a robotics integration engineer who has worked across the software stack, or a controls / automation engineer with strong real-time integration instincts ready to go deeper on robotics. This is not a front-end design role — visual polish lives with another hire.This role is onsite in Northbrook, IL. It is not remote. Start is immediate.What you'll doBring up and integrate robot arms and the surrounding control system; design and tune motion, tooling, sequencing, and safety logicIntegrate sensors, actuators, and I/O; build the real-time control/telemetry layer — stream motion and sensor data, model job/device state as explicit state machines, expose a clean API contract for the application and operator console to consumeStand up and maintain a simulation environment that mirrors the physical cell, so work can proceed in parallel with hardware and demos never block on a single robotIntegrate vision/perception where the task requires itWrite the supporting software around the robotics and controls — services, scripts, and APIs — and coordinate with the application team against a shared control-plane contractRequired skillsWe expect a strong fit from either a robotics or a controls/automation background:Robotics or industrial controls experience — hands-on bring-up and integration of robot arms (cobots a plus) and/or automated cells, motion control, PLC/industrial automation, sensor and actuator integration, in a real, physical settingReal-time integration — comfortable with control loops, I/O, and streaming machine state; modeling device/job state and telemetry (WebSockets/SSE, pub/sub, fieldbus, or equivalent)Programming — Python and/or C++ for robotics and integration work; scripting comfort generallyEnough full-stack ability to build the software around the hardware — APIs, services, a basic data layer (Node/TypeScript and Postgres in our stack, but we care more that you can work across it than that you've used our exact tools)Pragmatic, demo-driven, comfortable owning ambiguity in an early-stage buildStrongly preferred / differentiatorsROS / ROS2 — building and debugging real nodes, topics, and control loopsSimulation frameworks — Isaac Sim, Gazebo, MuJoCo, or similar; experience standing up a sim that meaningfully mirrors real hardwareAI/ML in robotics — learned policies, imitation/RL, or forward-looking approaches (e.g. VLA-style models)Vision / perception — object detection, pose estimation, hand-eye calibrationSLAM or other spatial/localization work, especially on mobile platformsFunctional safety — e-stop logic, safety-rated I/O, risk assessment for automated equipmentLogisticsOnsite, Northbrook, IL — required, no exceptionsImmediate startNDA required before any project specifics are shared. This posting intentionally omits details about the product and company.Contract or contract-to-hire; rate/duration to be discussed based on experience