Robotics Autonomy & Behavior Planning Engineer

Maven Robotics; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Maven Robotics in San Francisco is seeking an exceptional Robot Autonomy Engineer to build the decision‑making stack that turns goals into coordinated robot behavior in real industrial applications.

You will own the autonomy stack from task planning to trajectories, design behavior architectures, and coordinate motion for multiple robots sharing an industrial facility. This role requires strong experience in Python/C++, planning, and startup‑driven execution.

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in robotics, engineering, mathematics, computer science or a related discipline.
• Real‑world experience with motion planning on hardware (search-based, sampling-based, or optimization-based).
• Real‑world experience in behavior planning (FSMs/behavior trees) for long-horizon tasks.

Responsibilities

• Own the autonomy stack from planning to trajectories, coordinating task and motion planning.
• Design behavior architectures for long-horizon manipulation and navigation with recovery/fallbacks.
• Apply planning under uncertainty, goal/precedence reasoning and task allocation.
• Coordinate multi-robot motion to maximize throughput in shared workspaces.
• Integrate LLM/VLM reasoning into planning with safety verifications for real hardware.
• Define interfaces between learned policies and classical planning.

Skills

Python programming

C++ programming

Motion planning

Behavior planning

Problem solving

Startup mindset

Education

MS or PhD in robotics or related field

Tools

ROS 2

MoveIt

Drake

OMPL

PDDL/STRIPS/HTN

VDA5050

Job description

Maven Robotics in San Francisco is seeking an exceptional Robot Autonomy Engineer to build the decision‑making stack that turns goals into coordinated robot behavior in real industrial applications.

You will own the autonomy stack from task planning to trajectories, design behavior architectures, and coordinate motion for multiple robots sharing an industrial facility. This role requires strong experience in Python/C++, planning, and startup‑driven execution.