Software Engineer: Robotics Controls

Generalist AI, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Generalist seeks a software leader to own the real-time control stack for our robotic systems. You will drive the software that governs robot actions across multiple embodiments, collaborating with ML, hardware, and partners to ensure safe, efficient, and reliable operation.

Ideal candidates have extensive experience in rigid body kinematics and production-ready robotics software, with strong Python and C++ skills and ROS/ROS2 expertise. A PhD is a plus.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in robot controls and production-friendly software.
• Experience bringing robots to production with reliability requirements.
• Strong proficiency in high-performance Python and C++.

Responsibilities

• Own the software that controls our robots across embodiments from firmware to higher-level specs.
• Collaborate with ML and hardware teams to ensure safe, responsive actions and optimal system behavior.

Skills

Robot controls

Kinematics

Python

C++

ROS/ROS2

Production robotics

PhD advantageous

Education

PhD preferred

Tools

ROS/ROS2

ZCM

Simulation libraries

Job description

At Generalist, we are on a mission to build general intelligence for the physical world and make it useful to everyone. We believe the industries and homes of the future will depend on humans and machines working together in new ways. Robots can help us build more and get more done.

We build embodied foundation models, starting with a focus on dexterity. This requires advancing the frontiers of data, models, and hardware, to enable robots to intelligently interact with the physical world.

The company embraces both large-scale AI and robotics as core to its DNA. Our team of researchers, roboticists, and company builders come from OpenAI, Boston Dynamics, Google DeepMind, and other frontier labs—with a track record of shipping AI breakthroughs. Before Generalist, we pioneered large embodied multimodal models and vision-language-action models (PaLM-E, RT-2 , Gemini Robotics ), launched and scaled ChatGPT and GPT-4 to hundreds of millions of users, engineered the foundations of autonomous driving, built next-generation robots ( Atlas , Spot , Stretch ) and pushed the limits of what they can do (from parkour to manipulation , and testing robustness ).

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

About the Role

You will own the software that controls our robots. You will collaborate with ML to turn output intentions into smooth, efficient, safe, and responsive actions on a variety of robot embodiments. You will collaborate with hardware and partners to ensure the system, dynamics, and components are behaving optimally.

You’ll be responsible for:

• Designing, implementing, and testing the entire real-time control system from the low-level firmware to the input spec for each embodiment we have
• Ownership over a wide variety of robot embodiments from stock industrial co-bot arms to custom hardware

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have extensive experience in rigid body kinematics, and robotic controls
• Have experience bringing robots into production environments with stringent reliability requirements
• Are experienced in high performance, production-ready Python and C++
• Experience with kinematics/simulation libraries
• Have experience in robotic middleware platforms such as ROS/ROS2/ZCM
• Successful candidates have extensive experience (5+ years), often including a PhD