Robotics Software Engineer – Contract
Location: London – Hybrid / Remote
Duration: 3 months
Rate: Flexible
Sector: Robotics & Automation
Opportunity Overview
An innovative robotics and automation business is looking for a Robotics Software Engineer to join its engineering team on an initial 3‑month contract.
You’ll work across a modern ROS2 Jazzy robotics software stack, developing and deploying software that controls industrial robotic systems used in real‑world manufacturing environments.
This is an opportunity for a strong software engineer with practical robotics exposure to work alongside robotics developers, controls engineers and product engineers, with your work being deployed directly onto physical robotic systems.
Key Responsibilities
- Develop and deliver features across a ROS2 Jazzy robotics software stack.
- Design modular, testable and well‑documented software components.
- Diagnose and resolve complex system issues using field data, simulation and real hardware testing.
- Reproduce bugs and validate features directly on physical robotic systems.
- Develop robust solutions to real‑world edge cases and integration challenges.
- Participate in code and design reviews to maintain high engineering standards.
- Contribute to developer tooling, engineering processes and continuous improvement.
- Collaborate closely with software, robotics, controls and product engineering teams.
Essential Skills & Experience
- Proven experience developing and maintaining production software, including testing, CI/CD and debugging existing code.
- Strong Python software engineering skills applied to robotics or other complex software systems.
- Practical experience with ROS2, including nodes, topics, services, actions, parameters, launch and composition.
- Strong Linux skills, including shell, systemd, networking and containers.
- Ability to work effectively within a distributed engineering team and quickly become productive within an existing codebase.
- Experience working with physical hardware, robotics or automation environments is highly desirable.
C++ experience is advantageous but not essential.
Desirable Experience
- Working within a large or established software codebase.
- Docker‑based development and deployment.
- Behaviour trees or similar approaches for orchestrating long‑running robotic tasks.
- Software integration with physical hardware such as controllers, sensors or industrial equipment.
- Simulation environments such as Isaac Sim, Gazebo or similar.
- Industrial robotic arms, motion planning or manufacturing automation.
- DDS configuration and multi‑machine ROS2 networking.
- Structured logging, metrics and record/replay tooling.
- Embedded Linux and edge‑computing platforms such as NVIDIA Jetson.
What’s on Offer
- Initial 3‑month contract with immediate impact.
- Opportunity to work on real‑world robotics and automation technology.
- Exposure to a modern robotics stack incorporating ROS2, industrial robots, edge compute and physical AI.
- Collaborative environment working alongside experienced robotics, software and controls engineers.
- Hybrid/remote flexibility, with on‑site working in East London preferred.
- The opportunity to see your software deployed directly onto physical robotic systems.