Robotics Engineer

Metacognition; United States; Remote; USD 110,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote working

Collaborative startup environment

Job summary

Metacognition is seeking a Robotics Engineer to build and maintain robotics platforms, software stack and simulation infrastructure for translating research into real-world systems. You will work closely with science and engineering teams to deploy and validate autonomous agents on real hardware, combining software engineering with hands-on robotics experience.

The role emphasizes collaboration, safety, and reliability as you develop data pipelines, perception and planning capabilities for

Qualifications

• Degree in robotics or related field.
• Strong software in C/C++ and Python for real-time systems.
• Hands-on experience building, integrating and debugging robotic systems on real hardware with ROS/ROS 2.
• Solid grounding in core robotics including kinematics, dynamics, control, motion planning and perception.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain robotic platforms ( manipulators and mobile robots ), including sensor integration, calibration and actuator control.
• Develop and maintain the robotics software stack, including perception, state estimation, motion planning and control.
• Build simulation environments and sim-to-real pipelines for training and evaluating agents.
• Deploy and optimize learned models on robot hardware with attention to latency, safety and reliability.
• Develop data collection infrastructure, including teleoperation and logging, to generate high-quality datasets for research.
• Work with research scientists and ML engineers to turn research ideas into demonstrators.
• Establish testing, safety and lab practices for operating robots alongside people.
• Contribute to a rigorous and supportive engineering culture, sharing knowledge with colleagues.

Skills

C/C++

Python

Real-time systems

Education

Bachelor's degree in robotics, mechatronics, EE, CS

Tools

ROS/ROS 2

Gazebo/Isaac Sim/MuJoCo

Job description

Role Overview

The Robotics Engineer will build and maintain the robotics platforms, software stack and simulation infrastructure necessary for delivering the company’s research into the physical world. Working closely with the science and engineering teams, they will turn research ideas into working systems on real hardware. They should combine strong software engineering with hands-on hardware experience and enjoy the challenge of making intelligent agents operate reliably outside the lab.

Role scope will be calibrated to the experience and profile of the candidate

Key Responsibilities

Research

• Design, build and maintain robotic platforms (e.g., manipulators and mobile robots), including sensor integration, calibration and actuator control.




• Develop and maintain the robotics software stack, including perception, state estimation, motion planning and control.




• Build simulation environments and sim-to-real pipelines for training and evaluating agents.




• Deploy and optimize learned models (policies, vision, language and action models) on robot hardware, with attention to latency, safety and reliability.




• Develop data collection infrastructure, including teleoperation and logging, to generate high-quality datasets for research.

Collaboration

• Work with research scientists and ML engineers to turn research ideas into demonstrators.




• Establish testing, safety and lab practices for operating robots alongside people.




• Contribute to a rigorous and supportive engineering culture, sharing knowledge with colleagues.

Requirements

Essential

• Degree in robotics, mechatronics, electrical engineering, computer science or related field.




• Strong software engineering skills in C/C++ and Python, including code for real-time systems.




• Hands‑on experience building, integrating and debugging robotic systems on real hardware, using ROS or ROS 2.




• Solid grounding in core robotics including kinematics, dynamics, control, motion planning and perception.




• Experience with robotics simulators such as Isaac Sim, MuJoCo or Gazebo.

Preferred

• Master’s or PhD in robotics or related field.




• Experience deploying machine learning on robots, e.g., imitation learning, reinforcement learning or vision-language-action models.




• Experience with teleoperation systems, robot learning data pipelines or sim-to-real transfer.




• Familiarity with embedded systems and edge GPU compute (e.g., NVIDIA Jetson).

__________________________

Why join Metacognition?

You’ll work alongside leading researchers, engineers and thinkers to build intelligent systems capable of learning, remembering and reasoning over time. We’re an early stage startup with ambitious goals. Joining us will give you a genuine opportunity to shape both our technology and the company we become.

What you can expect

• Competitive remuneration




• Remote working




• The opportunity to work with leading researchers, engineers and industry experts




• A highly collaborative, fast-moving environment




• Meaningful ownership and the opportunity to influence how we build and grow




• Opportunities to learn, experiment and work on genuinely challenging problems

Metacognition is committed to creating an inclusive workplace where different perspectives, experiences and backgrounds are valued. We encourage applications from people with diverse backgrounds and experiences.