01 Engineering Member of Technical Staff – Robotics Winterthur On site

Binabik; Winterthur; Remote; CHF 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Hardware access

Career development

Public exposure

Team Collaboration

Pension plan & insurance

Job summary

Binabik AI, a ZHAW spin-off focusing on humanoid robotics for factory automation, seeks a Member of Technical Staff – Robotics to work across the robot stack from hardware interfaces to deployment at customer sites.

You will contribute to runtime, motion planning, skill execution, and evaluation, with hands-on time in the lab on G2 and R1 Pro and deployments at customers' shops in Switzerland and neighboring regions.

Qualifications

• Degree in robotics, CS, mechatronics, electrical or mechanical engineering or related field.
• 2+ years building software for real robots or physical systems in industry or research.
• Strong Python skills; C++ is a plus.
• Experience with ROS 2 and Linux.
• Willingness to travel to customer sites, mostly in Switzerland and neighboring countries.

Responsibilities

• Develop on-robot runtime and hardware abstraction layer, ROS 2 communication, real-time interfaces to arms, grippers, and mobile base.
• Work on kinematics, planning, and control for arms and mobile base; enable precise grasping and placement.
• Calibrate and integrate perception, coordinate frames and base/arm motion for repeatable positioning.
• Assemble and tune skills, integrate learned policies, manage task sequencing, and verify outcomes with LLMs/VLMs.
• Define benchmarks, run simulations and deploy on customer sites, translating learnings into product improvements.

Skills

Python

C++

ROS 2

Linux

Rigid-body kinematics

Debugging real hardware

Travel to customer sites

Education

Engineering degree (robotics, CS, mechatronics, electrical or mechanical)

Tools

ROS 2

Linux

Job description

Work across our robot stack, from hardware interfaces and skills to task execution and deployment at customer sites.

About Binabik AI

Humanoid robots that run your machines.

Binabik AI builds the software that lets humanoid robots do productive work on the factory floor. Our wheeled humanoids, AgiBot G2 and Galaxea R1 Pro, load and unload CNC lathes and mills, fetch material, carry parts and stack pallets. We focus on machine tending and intralogistics, the repetitive tasks that keep production running and are hard to staff.

Our approach combines proven methods from classical robotics, such as motion planning, perception and control, with recent advances in physical and agentic AI. The classical parts make the system reliable and the AI parts make it adaptable. Teaching a new task takes only a few recorded demonstrations. Binabik Teach captures them, and our Skill Engine breaks the task into reusable skills. Binabik Sim, our custom simulator, then replicates each skill and refines it across variations in parts, positions and environment conditions before it goes to the real machine. A hardware abstraction layer lets skills carry over between robot platforms, and data collected in operation goes back into improving them. Customer data stays on-premise.

We are a ZHAW spin-off with roots at the University of Zurich, the ETH AI Center and MIT. Our founders are experienced robotics and AI researchers who have published over 200 research papers. We are a pre-seed company finishing our first proofs of concept and moving towards industrial pilots. We plan to grow quickly over the next year, so the people who join now will help shape the product, the culture and the company.

The role

For a humanoid to run a machine reliably, many parts have to work together: the runtime that connects our software to the hardware, the motion planning and control that make every movement precise and safe, the skills that grasp and place parts, the layer that sequences tasks and recovers from errors, and the evaluation that tells us whether a change is an improvement. As Member of Technical Staff – Robotics, you’ll work across this stack and take responsibility for the parts where you can contribute most.

This is a broad role for engineers who want to work on the whole robot system rather than a single component. Where you start depends on your strengths, and your focus can shift as the product and the team grow. You’ll spend a significant part of your time in the lab with our G2 and R1 Pro, and you’ll join deployments at customer sites.

What you'll do

Depending on your background, you’ll work on several of the following areas:

• On-robot runtime. You’ll develop the hardware abstraction layer, ROS 2 communication and timing, the real-time control interfaces to arms, grippers and mobile base, and the logging and replay that make failures traceable.

• Kinematics, planning and control. You’ll work on inverse kinematics, collision-aware motion planning and trajectory generation for arms and mobile base, and on compliant and force-aware control for precise grasping and placing.

• Calibration and mobile manipulation. You’ll calibrate kinematics, cameras and coordinate frames, coordinate base and arm motion, and make the robot position itself repeatably at a workstation.

• Skills and task execution. You’ll compose and tune skills, integrate learned policies into the robot stack, and build the layer that sequences skills, uses LLMs and VLMs to verify outcomes, and decides whether to retry, re-plan or ask an operator.

• Evaluation and deployment. You’ll define benchmarks and metrics (success rate, cycle time, required operator assistance), run them in simulation and on hardware, and compare Binabik Sim with the real robot. You’ll bring robots into operation at customer sites and turn what you learn there into product improvements.

What you bring

• A degree in robotics, computer science, mechatronics, electrical or mechanical engineering, or a related field

• 2+ years of experience building software for real robots or other physical systems, in industry or a research lab (PhD research counts)

• Solid fundamentals in rigid-body kinematics, coordinate frames and transformations

• Depth in at least one of motion planning, control, state estimation or robot learning, and the willingness to learn the others

• Strong Python skills. Working knowledge of C++ is a plus.

• Experience with ROS 2 and Linux

• A systematic approach to debugging on real hardware

• Willingness to travel to customer sites occasionally, mostly in Switzerland and neighboring countries

Nice to have

• Hands‑on work with robot arms: hardware bring‑up, calibration or controller tuning

• Motion planning and kinematics libraries (e.g. MoveIt 2, cuRobo)

• Impedance, force or whole-body control, or mobile manipulation

• MuJoCo or other simulators connected to real robot interfaces

• Imitation learning, VLAs or robot foundation models

• Systems built on LLMs or VLMs (agents, tool use, evaluation)

• Programming industrial robots (e.g. KUKA, ABB, Universal Robots)

• Experience with humanoid or mobile manipulator platforms

• German

The team

Our engineers work on the whole pipeline from demonstration to deployed robot: perception, learned skills, simulation, the on-robot runtime and the tooling around it. Because the team is small, research and product work happen side by side. The person who trains a skill is often there when it loads a real lathe for the first time.

How we work

• Real hardware, every week. Everything we build is meant to run on our G2 and R1 Pro in the lab, and from there on a customer's shop floor.

• We build the robot software and the tools to develop it. That includes the on-robot stack, the simulator and the teaching tools. When a tool slows us down, we can fix it ourselves.

• Out of the lab early. We put new capabilities in front of customers quickly and evaluate them in real production settings. Engineers join these deployments, and what they see there shapes what we build next.

• AI-assisted development. We use coding agents and LLM tools every day, and we care about using them well.

Our stack: Python (backend and most of the robot stack), ROS 2, MuJoCo, PyTorch, GPU compute in the cloud, and React + TypeScript for frontends.

What we offer

• Compensation and early influence: a competitive compensation package. As one of the first employees, you will help shape the product, the company's direction and how we work.

• Hardware access: You'll work hands‑on with our humanoid robots, lab equipment and GPU compute from your first day.

• Career development: Your role can change as you do. Whether you want to specialize technically, take on more responsibility or move into a new area, we will support it.

• Customer and public exposure: You'll take part in customer visits and deployments, and you can represent Binabik at industry events and conferences.

• Team: You'll join colleagues with backgrounds in robotics and AI research who enjoy solving difficult problems and bringing them into practice.

• Benefits: a pension plan well above the legal minimum, comprehensive insurance coverage and 5 weeks of paid holiday.

• Location: Our office at Technopark Winterthur, with the robot lab on site, is a short train ride from Zürich.

Hiring process

1. Introductory call: a short conversation about your background, your goals and what we're building.

2. Technical interview: We go into your experience in depth and work through a problem drawn from our day-to-day work. For commercial roles, this step is a case discussion.

3. A day with us: You'll spend a day at our office in Winterthur, see the robots in operation and meet the team.

Binabik AI is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of every background, gender, age, origin, religion, sexual orientation and disability.