Senior Autonomy Engineer

Andromeda; City of Melbourne; On-site; AUD 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Andromeda in Melbourne is seeking a first-principles Autonomy Engineer to advance Abi's autonomy stack, with emphasis on safety, reliability, and usability. This role focuses on production-grade systems, fault tolerance, and building a scalable robotics platform in human-centric environments.

You will contribute across path planning, SLAM, perception integration, and hardware debugging, collaborating with hardware, software, and customer teams to ship impactful autonomy features.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in motion planning, prediction, or behaviours for autonomous systems.
• Production deployment of ML-based autonomy solutions.
• Strong knowledge of classical control and ML-based methods.
• Shippable, robust software in modern C++ with tooling in Python.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement and maintain the autonomy stack for Abi.
• Hardening, testing across software, hardware and integrated systems.
• Maintain a fleet of Abis across production environments and customer sites.
• Hands-on hardware debugging and sensor/actuator improvements.
• Improve UX by interfacing autonomy with cloud and robot frontend.
• LeadRequirements gathering and full product lifecycle alignment.
• Develop high-fidelity IsaacSim simulations for end-to-end validation.
• Communicate complex technical ideas across multidisciplinary teams.

Skills

Robotics expertise

Motion planning

Prediction & behaviours

First-principles thinking

System integration

Cross-functional leadership

Tools

C++

Python

Job description

The Bigger Picture

At Andromeda, we're building the social intelligence layer for humanoid robots - technology that allows robots to understand people, build relationships and become a meaningful part of everyday life.

The Bigger Picture

At Andromeda, we're building the social intelligence layer for humanoid robots - technology that allows robots to understand people, build relationships and become a meaningful part of everyday life.

Our first robot, Abi, is already doing this in aged care and healthcare, where she brings conversation, companionship and engagement to people every day.

Now we're scaling from early deployments into a platform that can operate across thousands of real-world environments. We're looking for individuals who want to tackle hard problems across robotics and AI, and help define what it means for robots to live and interact alongside people.

Our Values

• Empathy - Kindness and compassion are at the heart of everything we do
• Play - Play sharpens focus. It keeps us curious, fast and obsessed with the craft
• Never Settle - A relentless ambition, bias toward action, and uncomfortable levels of curiosity
• Tenacity - Tenacious under pressure, we assume chaos and stay in motion to adapt and progress
• Unity - Different minds. Shared mission. No passengers

The Role

We are looking for a first-principles Autonomy Engineer to solve one of the hardest challenges in robotics: enabling our robot, Abi, to navigate safely and gracefully alongside people. This role goes beyond simple A-to-B navigation, and the work will directly shape the future of Andromeda autonomy stack. You will be responsible for improving the capabilities of the autonomy stack from a safety, reliability, and usability standpoint. This is a hands-on senior role centre on safety-critical systems, fault tolerance, and resilient autonomy in demanding human-centric environments. As such engineering excellence, safety, and reliability sit at the heart of everything you do.

This is a chance to build a production-grade autonomy stack from the ground up and ship a product that has a meaningful impact on people's lives.

What You'll Do

• Build and Maintain Foundational Autonomy: You will design, implement, and maintain the foundational autonomy stack of Abi. This will involve working on path planning, SLAM, collision avoidance, and incorporating classification signals from the perception stack to help make foundational autonomy decisions
• Production Deployed Foundational Autonomy: You will help harden the deployed autonomy stack. Build, develop and execute tests on software, hardware and integrated systems.
• Maintaining a Fleet of Autonomous Systems: You will help with maintaining a large fleet of Abis in a customer environment. You will help with improving the operational process of deploying Abi to different production environments. You will have to perform customer site visits to test and validate developed features
• Hardware Integration: You will regularly have to be hands-on with Abi - debugging the sensors and effectors for root cause analysis, as well working with hardware to make specific sensor recommendations and debug issues down to the hardware layer.
• Improving User Experience: You will work on improving the overall user experience of using the autonomy systems. This will range from interfacing the autonomy stack with cloud infrastructure to interfacing the autonomy stack with the robot front end
• Systems Engineering: You will be working on a robotics platform which has multiple internal and external consumers, bringing rise to requirements gathering. This will involve you having to follow the full product development lifecycle
• Simulation & Validation: You will build and maintain high-fidelity simulation scenarios in IssacSim to test foundational autonomy end to end, ensuring our software is validated in simulation before it is deployed to hardware
• Effective Technical Communication and Leadership: You will have to communicate complex technical ideas, lead cross-functional discussions, and work on projects between multidisciplinary teams

Requirements

What Success Looks Like

In the first 90 days, you will understand Abi's autonomy stack, how Abi behaves in the field, and where the reliability and safety risks sit - and you will be shipping improvements to the edge software with confidence. You will also gain an understanding of areas of Abi's usability that can be improved with the autonomy stack.

Over the first 12 months, success means the edge software is more reliable, safer, and easier to debug in the field: safety mechanisms you can trust, incorporation of perception signals for core decision making in human-centric environments, and improved test and observability frameworks. Success also entails significantly enhanced usability of autonomy-enabled Abi's in the customer sites, alongside a more robust and streamlined production deployment pipeline.

What You'll Bring

• Deep Expertise in Robotics: You have 5+ years of experience working on the motion planning, prediction, or behaviours stack for autonomous vehicles, mobile robots, or a similar domain. You have experience deploying ML based autonomy solutions in a production environment
• Strong Algorithmic Foundation: You have deployed and tuned modern robotics algorithms in a production environment. You have a deep understanding of classical control as well as modern ML based algorithms
• Production Software Engineering: You have a proven ability to ship robust, high-quality code in modern C++ and are proficient with Python for tooling and data analysis. Experience with large-scale, performance-critical, distributed software systems is essential.
• First-Principles Thinking: You are skilled at breaking down complex, ambiguous problems into clear, solvable components. You are comfortable building systems from scratch and can reason about them from a fundamental physics and mathematics perspective
• Full-Stack Robotics Exposure: You understand how your components interact with the entire robotics system, everything from perception through policy to actuation