Senior Autonomy Architect — Robot Planning & Execution

Lightspeed; Northbrook (IL); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

LightSpeed Build Technologies seeks a Senior Agentic Planning Engineer to design how our robots decide next actions on wall panel manufacturing and on-site construction. You will build planners that sequence move and actuate primitives, choose between classical or learned policies, and handle failures with autonomous recovery.

You'll define primitives, interfaces, and guardrails, create a two-layer planning architecture, and ensure end-to-end execution on real robots.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building autonomy, task planning or decision-making systems for robots or autonomous vehicles, with systems deployed in production.
• Task-level planning on real robots: behavior trees, task and motion planning (TAMP), HTN or similar.
• Execution monitoring and fault recovery in a deployed system
• Built interfaces between planning, perception and control that other teams built against
• Hands-on with reasoning models or LLMs in a decision loop, and a clear view of where they help and where they don't

Responsibilities

• Define primitives and their contract: inputs, preconditions, success checks and failure codes
• Define the interface between the planner and the executor: step request, choice of classical or policy, result and evidence
• Keep the primitive library callable by the planner, not wired by hand for each task
• Build the task graph from BIM: the elements in front of the robot and the dependencies between them
• Build the planner in two layers: a reasoning layer for open-ended decisions, and solvers for reach, collision and trajectory
• Decide when to use a reasoning model and when not to; keep it off the real-time control path
• Set the rule for choosing classical control or a learned policy for each step, based on world-model confidence and how structured the step is
• Extend the planner's reasoning and sequencing for each new trade
• Measure success by how fast a new trade can be taught
• Build the execution monitor: verify each step, then retry, switch executor, skip and flag, or elevate to a person
• Log every decision with its reason and evidence, so any outcome can be explained
• Keep the planner inside guardrails: a constrained action space, declared parameter ranges, and safety that is never the planner's to decide
• Build the operator view for escalations and remote assistance
• Design the planner so two robots can share one world model and divide work: one holds, one fastens; one supplies, one installs
• Co-own the foundation interfaces with the world sensing and robot learning principals, and own the primitive contract
• Run the new stack alongside production on our existing robots, switchable per job, so it is tested on real work from the start
• Prove the system by running whole tasks end to end on real robots, with recovery

Skills

Python

C++

ROS2

Linux

Docker

CI/CD workflows

Mentoring engineers

Education

MS or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, AI or related field

Tools

MoveIt

OMPL

LLM/Agent planning in robotics

Job description

LightSpeed Build Technologies seeks a Senior Agentic Planning Engineer to design how our robots decide next actions on wall panel manufacturing and on-site construction. You will build planners that sequence move and actuate primitives, choose between classical or learned policies, and handle failures with autonomous recovery.

You'll define primitives, interfaces, and guardrails, create a two-layer planning architecture, and ensure end-to-end execution on real robots.