Dynamic Locomotion & Whole-Body Control Engineer

Neura Robotics; Zürich; On-site; CHF 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Neura Robotics in Zurich is seeking a Locomotion & Whole-Body Control Engineer to advance the core control stack for the 4NE-1 humanoid. You will develop motion generation, trajectory optimization, and real-time whole-body control, enabling robust, high-frequency operation on real hardware.

You will design dynamic models, handle constraints, and deploy algorithms on physical robots, collaborating with multidisciplinary teams to push practical humanoid capabilities.

Qualifications

• 4+ years hands-on experience in locomotion and/or whole-body control for physical robots.
• Strong knowledge of floating-base rigid-body dynamics and contact modeling.
• Familiarity with centroidal dynamics and reduced-order models (SRBD, LIPM).
• Expertise in optimal control, constrained optimization and MPC.
• Experience deploying real-time control at high frequencies (500 Hz–1 kHz).
• Proficient in C++ and Python for tooling and prototyping.
• Ability to collaborate across multidisciplinary robotics teams.

Responsibilities

• Develop whole-body motion generation and control algorithms for the 4NE-1 humanoid, including locomotion, balancing, contact transitions, and loco-manipulation tasks.
• Design and implement trajectory optimization and MPC pipelines for humanoid motion generation, considering robot state, contact schedules, ground reaction forces, centroidal momentum, and joint trajectories.
• Build and maintain QP-based whole-body control and task-space inverse dynamics frameworks to execute planned motions on the physical robot at frequencies up to 1 kHz.
• Develop and improve dynamic models of the humanoid system, including floating-base rigid-body dynamics, forward and inverse kinematics, Jacobians, and full-body dynamics computation.
• Formulate and implement kinematic, dynamic, contact, friction, torque, stability, and joint-limit constraints across planning and control layers.
• Improve solver performance, numerical robustness, and real-time reliability of optimization pipelines deployed on hardware.
• Deploy, tune, and validate locomotion and whole-body control algorithms on physical humanoid robots, including debugging hardware-specific effects, contact models, and control performance.
• Develop high-performance C++ software for real-time control systems and build Python-based tooling for analysis, testing, and prototyping.
• Collaborate closely with engineers across controls, hardware, simulation, perception, AI, and systems teams to deliver integrated humanoid capabilities.

Education

MSc or PhD in Robotics, Controls, Mechanical Eng, Electrical Eng, Computer Science, or related field

Tools

Pinocchio

MuJoCo

Crocoddyl

OCS2

TSID

IPOPT

CasADi

Job description

Neura Robotics in Zurich is seeking a Locomotion & Whole-Body Control Engineer to advance the core control stack for the 4NE-1 humanoid. You will develop motion generation, trajectory optimization, and real-time whole-body control, enabling robust, high-frequency operation on real hardware.

You will design dynamic models, handle constraints, and deploy algorithms on physical robots, collaborating with multidisciplinary teams to push practical humanoid capabilities.