Staff Autonomy ML Engineer - Embodied AI in Robotics

Knightscope, Inc; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 240,000 - 275,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

401(k)

Paid time off

On-site at Sunnyvale HQ

Job summary

Knightscope, Inc. is hiring a Staff Autonomy Engineer in Sunnyvale, CA, to own the full intelligence-to-action loop for autonomous robots and to advance embodied AI across our deployed platforms.

You will lead learning-based approaches, integrate planning with control, and mentor engineers while shaping the autonomy stack. This role requires senior expertise and a track record of deploying research to production.

Qualifications

• 7+ years shipping autonomy, planning, or decision-making systems to production.
• Experience integrating learned planning or policy models with classical control systems and safety constraints.
• Strong software engineering in C++ and Python; real-time autonomy stacks.
• Demonstrated ability to take systems from research prototype to deployed production platform.
• Track record of driving architecture decisions across perception, planning, and control teams.

Responsibilities

• Advance core AI and machine learning capabilities for embodied autonomy, spanning computer vision, learned planning, open-world generalization, and real-time decision making, across deployed robotic platforms.
• Push the boundaries of learning-based robotics by incorporating large vision-language-action models to improve reasoning, situational understanding, and explainability in safety-critical environments.
• Own the full intelligence-to-action loop: from sensor observations through entity reasoning, world-state modeling, to policy decisions that drive safe, bounded robot behavior.
• Build the closed-loop learning pipeline: production outcomes and operator feedback feed model evaluation and policy improvement without modifying safety-critical boundaries.
• Drive technical architecture decisions across the autonomy stack and mentor engineers across the team.

Skills

Autonomy software engineering

C++

Python

Real-time systems

Robotics

System integration

Research-to-production

Education

MS or PhD in Robotics/CS/ML

Tools

VLA architectures

Foundation models

Simulation environments

Job description

Knightscope, Inc. is hiring a Staff Autonomy Engineer in Sunnyvale, CA, to own the full intelligence-to-action loop for autonomous robots and to advance embodied AI across our deployed platforms.

You will lead learning-based approaches, integrate planning with control, and mentor engineers while shaping the autonomy stack. This role requires senior expertise and a track record of deploying research to production.