Senior Robotics Engineer, Controls
clera · San Francisco · onsite
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.