Founding Autonomy Engineer: Robot Mission Orchestrator

Andromeda Robotics; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Andromeda Robotics is seeking an experienced autonomous systems engineer to found and lead the Mission Autonomy team for Abi, our social-robotics platform. You will design and implement the long-duration decision-making layer, orchestrating Abi’s daily activities across conversations, navigation, perception, and operator tooling.

The role blends research and hands-on robotics, requiring strong skills in Python, C++, and Rust, and experience with ROS 2, Nav2, and simulation tools.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building autonomous systems, with an MS or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Previous autonomy experience in areas such as self-driving, mobile robotics, warehouse robotics, field robotics, or similar, including at least one deployment lifecycle from concept through deployment and operations.
• Experience with ROS 2, Nav2, and simulation tools such as Isaac Sim, Gazebo, or MuJoCo.
• Awareness of safety-critical design principles for robots operating around people.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python, C++, or Rust. Comfortable working across the stack, from high-level planning and behavior to low-level robot interfaces and runtime constraints.
• Practical robotics experience. Comfortable bringing up hardware, debugging sensors and actuators, and tinkering with the robot in the office.
• Strong communication and influence skills, particularly when working across Australian teams and with engineers whose systems you do not directly own.
• Architecture and software depth. Able to steer the system design, define interfaces and contracts, and write the first versions of the primitives rather than wait for another team.

Responsibilities

• Design the system. Challenge our initial concepts as you discover what a full shift actually needs: is it formulated as an agent harness ingesting scene graphs and acting over robust, typed action primitives? Or will you invoke World Models and VLA components? You will shape the Mission Autonomy roadmap for Andromeda.
• Prototype the system. Get a mission autonomy loop running in simulation early. Use it to decide what we build, before the company commits teams to an architecture.
• Co-design and build simulation capabilities with our simulation engineer.
• Own the technical direction and run the design conversations with autonomy, chatbot, perception, audio and platform teams. Turn them into contracts those teams can build against.
• Shape the action primitives. Work out what the mission needs from the layers underneath. Specify it properly. Get it built, whether that means convincing the owning team or writing it yourself.
• Design for degradation. Define how Abi should behave when audio, perception, connectivity, navigation, or platform health degrades. Make those moments safe, useful, and legible to operators, while preserving Abi’s character rather than treating every failure as a generic error state.
• Establish deployment patterns. Create a repeatable path from simulation prototypes to demonstrations on the robot, with the configuration, observability, test gates, and rollback mechanisms needed to iterate safely.
• Build the evaluation system. Define benchmarking protocols, evaluation methods, and reporting that let us continuously measure the longest-horizon missions Abi can complete, the interventions they require, and the failure modes that limit them.

Skills

Autonomous systems

Robotics

ROS 2

Nav2

Simulation tools

Python

C++

Rust

Cross-team collaboration

System architecture

Education

MS/PhD in Robotics or CS

Tools

ROS 2

Nav2

Isaac Sim

Gazebo

MuJoCo

Job description

Andromeda Robotics is seeking an experienced autonomous systems engineer to found and lead the Mission Autonomy team for Abi, our social-robotics platform. You will design and implement the long-duration decision-making layer, orchestrating Abi’s daily activities across conversations, navigation, perception, and operator tooling.

The role blends research and hands-on robotics, requiring strong skills in Python, C++, and Rust, and experience with ROS 2, Nav2, and simulation tools.