Real-Time Robotics Controls Engineering Manager

Apptronik; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Apptronik is seeking an Engineering Manager - Controls to lead a team of software engineers responsible for the real-time control software on our humanoid robots. You will hire, mentor, and drive delivery within the Controls roadmap, ensuring reliability and production readiness.

In this player-leader role, you will review designs, work closely with firmware, embedded software, learning, teleoperation, and test teams to bring new capabilities from simulation onto the robot fleet.

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field.
• 4+ years of relevant industry experience in robot controls or robotics software (or 2+ years with a PhD), including 1+ year managing engineers and 2+ years as a technical lead.

Responsibilities

• Oversee development of the real-time control framework that runs on the robot, including robot drivers, state estimation, control interfaces, and the integration of learned policies and teleoperation.
• Plan and drive the team's deliverables in coordination with other leads within the broader Controls roadmap. Break program goals into deliverable work, track progress against milestones, and raise risks to schedule or quality early.
• Hire, manage, and mentor a team of controls and software engineers. Set clear priorities and ownership, give regular feedback, and develop engineers and tech leads into stronger technical contributors.
• Maintain a high bar for code quality through design reviews, code reviews, and automated testing, including simulation and hardware-in-the-loop regression tests. Own the team's part of the software release process and the stability of what ships to the fleet.
• Keep the control software and tooling fast to work with, so engineers can quickly try new approaches to hard robotics problems in simulation and on hardware.
• Ensure the control stack behaves consistently in simulation and on hardware, and support robot bring-up, calibration tooling, and root-cause analysis of issues found in testing and in the field.
• Partner with the firmware, embedded software, learning, teleoperation, systems, and test teams to align on interfaces, priorities, and schedules, and represent the team in stakeholder reviews.

Skills

Controls

Real-Time Software

Hardware Deployment

People Leadership

Execution

Education

MS or PhD in Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field

Tools

C++

ROS 2

Job description

Apptronik is seeking an Engineering Manager - Controls to lead a team of software engineers responsible for the real-time control software on our humanoid robots. You will hire, mentor, and drive delivery within the Controls roadmap, ensuring reliability and production readiness.

In this player-leader role, you will review designs, work closely with firmware, embedded software, learning, teleoperation, and test teams to bring new capabilities from simulation onto the robot fleet.