Senior Robotics Engineer — AI Manipulation & Automation

General Motors Company; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 153,000 - 234,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health and wellbeing benefits

Total Rewards resources

Job summary

General Motors seeks a Senior Robotics Software Engineer to design, build, and deploy AI-enabled robotic applications for industrial automation in Mountain View, CA. You will own perception, planning, control, AI inference, and data flow across hardware interfaces and production environments.

The role requires strong Python/C++/ROS 2 skills, a Master’s degree, and 2+ years in robotics software. You will collaborate across teams to ship robust solutions and optimize end-to-end task performance.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, AI, or a related technical field.
• 2+ years of experience developing robotic software or applications involving manipulation, perception, motion planning, simulation, industrial automation, or related systems.
• Strong Python, C++, and ROS 2 development skills, with experience building modular robotics software.
• Familiarity with AI/ML workflows for robotic perception, learned manipulation, multimodal robotics, and autonomous systems.
• Experience with inverse kinematics, trajectory generation and execution, collision checking, robot state representation, gripper control, and integration of manipulators, sensors, and other automation hardware.
• Experience deploying AI models with PyTorch, TensorRT, ONNX Runtime, or comparable GPU-accelerated inference frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Design and deploy robotic applications for industrial automation, including pick-and-place, material handling, part transfer, machine tending, inspection support, and vision-guided manipulation.
• Build collision-aware, dynamically feasible manipulation pipelines integrating object detection and pose estimation, grasp generation, inverse kinematics, motion and trajectory planning, collision avoidance, reliable execution, and gripper control.
• Develop computer-vision and AI perception systems for detection, semantic and instance segmentation, 6D pose estimation, RGB-D and point-cloud processing, scene understanding, and grasp-point generation.
• Integrate AI/ML models into real-time or near-real-time robotic workflows to improve perception, generalization, manipulation, task-level decision-making, and runtime reliability.
• Develop closed-loop robotic systems that use sensor feedback to monitor task execution, detect failures, update robot actions, and improve runtime reliability.
• Develop and evaluate VLA models and learned policies for multimodal task understanding, natural-language instruction following, action generation, imitation learning, and autonomous manipulation.
• Use NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, Omniverse, Replicator, and related tools to build digital environments, generate synthetic data, validate behavior, and develop simulation-to-real workflows before physical deployment.
• Own robotic software architecture across perception, planning, control, simulation, AI inference, data flow, system interfaces, hardware integration, and deployment; develop modular, maintainable software using Python, C++, ROS 2, Linux, Git, Docker, and reproducible development environments.
• Integrate and calibrate manipulators, grippers, RGB/RGB-D and depth cameras, force/torque sensors, and other automation hardware, including camera intrinsics/extrinsics, hand-eye calibration, and robot-to-cell registration; make calibration robust and repeatable in the field.
• Implement force and compliant control—such as impedance, admittance, and guarded moves—for contact-rich tasks including insertion and assembly.
• Build data-collection workflows for learned policies, including teleoperation, demonstration capture, dataset curation, and experiment tracking.
• Debug and validate systems across software, AI models, perception, simulation, motion planning, controls, networking, and hardware. Define measures such as task success, perception accuracy, cycle time, trajectory quality, repeatability, and reliability.
• Collaborate with robotics, perception, ML, controls, manufacturing, and plant-facing teams to troubleshoot issues, document solutions, and transition prototypes from simulation through hardware integration, validation, and deployment.
• Provide technical ownership of robotic applications from early prototyping and simulation through hardware integration, validation, and deployment.
• Optional: Integrate robotic cells with industrial systems and safety infrastructure, including PLCs (OPC UA, Ethernet/IP, Modbus), safety I/O, and robot safety configurations in accordance with ISO 10218 and ISO/TS 15066.

Skills

Python

C++

ROS 2

Linux

Git

Docker

MoveIt

NVIDIA Isaac Sim

Omniverse Replicator

Reproducible dev envs

Education

Master’s degree in CS/Robotics/AI

Tools

Lula

RMPflow

OMPL

NVIDIA Isaac Lab

Job description

General Motors seeks a Senior Robotics Software Engineer to design, build, and deploy AI-enabled robotic applications for industrial automation in Mountain View, CA. You will own perception, planning, control, AI inference, and data flow across hardware interfaces and production environments.

The role requires strong Python/C++/ROS 2 skills, a Master’s degree, and 2+ years in robotics software. You will collaborate across teams to ship robust solutions and optimize end-to-end task performance.