Lead Locomotion Controls Engineer for Hexapod Robot

Galactic Resource Advancement Mechanism Technologies Corporation; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Generous equity

Relocation bonus

Job summary

GRAM is seeking a Software Controls Engineer, Locomotion with 5-7+ years of experience to own the locomotion stack for a first‑of‑its‑kind six‑legged insectoid robot designed to climb and traverse complex steel infrastructure. You’ll join a small, scrappy founding team building something that doesn’t exist anywhere else.

You will own the Locomotion stack on hardware; the near‑term benchmark is to cover a complex lattice from a single placement using learned policies, local contact intelligence,

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in robotics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Ownership of architecture and technical direction for a deployed manipulation system spanning planning, sensing, control, monitoring, and recovery.
• Strong C++ and Python skills with ROS 2, Drake, MoveIt, Pinocchio, or equivalent stack.
• Built and deployed a closed-loop manipulation capability on a physical robot.
• Led a failure-driven redesign that separated planning, perception, control, and hardware causes and produced a correction that survived repeated physical test.

Responsibilities

• Getting the robot walking reliably and integrating magnetic adhesion for vertical/near-vertical traversal on steel lattice structures
• Building perception-conditioned path planning and foothold selection so the robot can navigate dozens of different lattice structure geometries
• Reviewing and rebuilding existing control software with proper software development practices, discarding what doesn't work and establishing solid foundations

Skills

C++

Python

ROS 2

MoveIt

Pinocchio

Education

Bachelor's degree in robotics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, or related field

Tools

ROS 2

Drake

MoveIt

Pinocchio

MuJoCo

MuJoCo MPC

Crocoddyl

OCS2

Reinforcement Learning

Sim-to-Real

legged_gym

rsl_rl

Job description

GRAM is seeking a Software Controls Engineer, Locomotion with 5-7+ years of experience to own the locomotion stack for a first‑of‑its‑kind six‑legged insectoid robot designed to climb and traverse complex steel infrastructure. You’ll join a small, scrappy founding team building something that doesn’t exist anywhere else.

You will own the Locomotion stack on hardware; the near‑term benchmark is to cover a complex lattice from a single placement using learned policies, local contact intelligence,