Member of Technical Staff - Robot Control

Machenta; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful equity

Private health insurance

Free food

Job summary

Machenta Ltd in London is seeking a Member of Technical Staff to advance autonomous robotics control. You’ll design and tune real robot controllers, from torque/impedance to real-time optimal control, collaborating across the stack to deploy on hardware.

You will join a close-knit, ambitious team in King's Cross, contributing to high-impact robotics projects, with ownership over your work and opportunities to shape our hardware-software integration and learning-enabled control methods.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience designing, testing and deploying controllers on real robots.
• Strong foundation in rigid-body dynamics, control theory and numerical optimisation.
• Experience with optimal control methods such as MPC or trajectory optimisation.
• Proficiency in Python and C++ for real-time systems.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement and tune low-level robot controllers, including torque, impedance and force control.
• Formulate and solve real-time optimal control problems, such as MPC and trajectory optimisation, under tight latency and compute constraints.
• Combine model-based controllers with learned policies to achieve robust behaviour on real hardware.
• Bring up and validate controllers on physical robots, using rigorous testing.
• Help define how the control stack interfaces with our learning systems, shaping how policies and controllers work together across the robot.

Skills

Robotics control design

Rigid-body dynamics

Numerical optimisation

MPC / trajectory optimisation

Python and C++

Real-time systems

Debugging complex systems

Clear communication

Tools

Python

C++

Job description

About the Company

We've been building Machenta for less than a year, and so we're still right at the beginning here. We’re a very close team, sharing the journey together, working in person in London, and collaborating throughout. This has been great fun! And as we bring in the next few team members, we're now thinking carefully about what roles we need, and who we should be speaking with. Everybody joining will be Machenta’s expert in their part of the team, with ownership and responsibility for shaping where we go next and how we get there. We pay well, and we'll be giving you meaningful equity, private health insurance, and lots of free food.

About the Role

As a Member of Technical Staff working on control, you’ll work on the foundation that lets our robots act precisely, safely and reliably in the real world. You’ll work across the control stack, from low-level torque, impedance and force control to real-time optimal control, and help shape how learned policies and model-based control work together to get the best of both. It’s a highly hands-on, collaborative role: you’ll take ideas from formulation to deployment on real hardware, working closely with everyone at Machenta. If you enjoy the moment when a robot that struggled yesterday moves smoothly today, you’ll find this work very rewarding.

In This Role You Will:

• Design, implement and tune low-level robot controllers, including torque, impedance and force control.

• Formulate and solve real-time optimal control problems, such as MPC and trajectory optimisation, under tight latency and compute constraints.

• Combine model-based controllers with learned policies to achieve robust, dexterous behaviour on real hardware.

• Bring up and validate controllers on physical robots, using rigorous testing.

• Help define how the control stack interfaces with our learning systems, shaping how policies and controllers work together across the robot.

What We Hope You’ll Bring:

• Hands-on experience designing, testing and deploying controllers on real robots, not just in simulation.

• A strong foundation in rigid-body dynamics, control theory and numerical optimisation.

• Experience with optimal control methods such as MPC or trajectory optimisation, and the practical know-how to make them run in real time.

• Strong Python and C++ skills, and experience writing performance-critical code for real-time systems.

• The ability to solve hard problems and debug complex systems spanning software and hardware.

• Clear communication of your ideas and findings to the team.

Bonus Points If You Have:

• Experience at an early-stage robotics or AI company.

• A PhD in a relevant field.

• Experience across different robot manipulation platforms.

• Great intuition for tuning controllers and integrating them with learnt policies.

• Experience designing floating-base or whole-body controllers, for example on humanoid, legged or mobile manipulation platforms.

• Experience training and deploying RL-based controllers on real hardware, including tackling sim-to-real transfer.

Joining Us

We're setting off to change how robots learn, and how people interact with them. If you're excited about joining in on the adventure with us all, and about working in a close-knit, highly ambitious, highly passionate team in the heart of King's Cross London, we would love to hear from you!