Lead Robotics Engineer AI-Driven Manipulation & Automation

General Motors Company; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 153,000 - 234,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health and wellbeing benefits

GM vehicle discounts

Paid vacation & holidays

Tuition assistance

Job summary

General Motors Company is seeking a Senior Robotics Software Engineer in Mountain View, CA to design, develop, and deploy AI-enabled robotic applications for industrial automation. You will work across perception, planning, and control to create robust, production-ready systems that leverage vision-language-action models and learned manipulation policies.

The role requires a Master’s degree and 2+ years of robotics software experience, with strong Python, C++, and ROS 2 skills.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Mechanical, Electrical, or related field.
• 2+ years of experience developing robotic software or applications involving manipulation, perception, motion planning, simulation, or automation.
• Strong Python, C++, and ROS 2 development skills for modular robotics software.
• Familiarity with AI/ML workflows for robotic perception, learned manipulation, multimodal robotics, and autonomous systems.
• Experience with perception systems (detection, segmentation, pose estimation, RGB-D, point clouds) and integrating AI models into real-time pipelines.
• Experience debugging complex robotic systems across software, simulation, AI, networking, and hardware interfaces.

Responsibilities

• Design and deploy robotic applications for industrial automation, including pick-and-place, material handling, part transfer, machine tending, inspection, and vision-guided manipulation.
• Build collision-aware, dynamically feasible manipulation pipelines with detection, grasp generation, IK, motion planning, and gripper control.
• Develop computer-vision and AI perception systems for 6D pose estimation, RGB-D processing, 3D understanding, and grasp-point generation.
• Integrate AI/ML models into real-time robotic workflows to improve perception, manipulation, and decision-making.
• Develop closed-loop systems using sensor feedback to monitor and adapt task execution.
• Develop and evaluate VLA models and learned policies for multimodal understanding and natural-language instruction following.
• Use tools like NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Omniverse, Replicator to create simulations and validate behavior before hardware deployment.
• Own robotic software architecture from perception to deployment; ensure modular, maintainable code in Python/C++/ROS 2.

Skills

Python

C++

ROS 2

AI/ML workflows

Perception

Motion planning

Inverse kinematics

Education

Master’s degree in Computer Science/Robotics/Engineering

Tools

MoveIt

NVIDIA Isaac Sim/Isaac Lab

OMPL

Lula

RMPflow

Job description

General Motors Company is seeking a Senior Robotics Software Engineer in Mountain View, CA to design, develop, and deploy AI-enabled robotic applications for industrial automation. You will work across perception, planning, and control to create robust, production-ready systems that leverage vision-language-action models and learned manipulation policies.

The role requires a Master’s degree and 2+ years of robotics software experience, with strong Python, C++, and ROS 2 skills.