Locomotion Controls Engineer for Hexapod Robot (On-Site)

Gram Games; 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 developing a ground-breaking hexapod inspection robot and seeks a Software Controls Engineer, Locomotion with 5-7+ years of experience to own the locomotion stack on hardware. The role is on-site in Palo Alto, within a fast-moving founding team emphasizing hands-on deployment and rapid iteration.

You will fuse perception-guided foothold selection, learned locomotion strategies, and robust control software to enable climbing steel lattices and vertical traversal.

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 with robotics framework experience (e.g., ROS 2, Drake, MoveIt, Pinocchio).
• Built and deployed a closed-loop manipulation capability on a physical robot with measurable results.
• Led a failure-driven redesign that separated planning, perception, control and hardware causes and produced a correction that endured repeated tests.

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 for navigating dozens of lattice geometries.
• Reviewing and rebuilding existing control software with solid software development practices.

Skills

C++

Python

ROS 2

MoveIt

Drake

Pinocchio

Education

Bachelor's degree in robotics or related field

Tools

ROS 2

MoveIt

Pinocchio

Drake

MuJoCo

MuJoCo MPC

Job description

GRAM is developing a ground-breaking hexapod inspection robot and seeks a Software Controls Engineer, Locomotion with 5-7+ years of experience to own the locomotion stack on hardware. The role is on-site in Palo Alto, within a fast-moving founding team emphasizing hands-on deployment and rapid iteration.

You will fuse perception-guided foothold selection, learned locomotion strategies, and robust control software to enable climbing steel lattices and vertical traversal.