Staff Autonomy ML Engineer — On-site in Sunnyvale

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

Benefits offered by this job

Base salary: $240,000–$275,000

Stock options

Benefits: Medical, dental, vision, 401

PTO

On-site at Sunnyvale HQ

Job summary

Knightscope, Inc. is seeking a Staff Autonomy Engineer to own the intelligence-to-action loop for its autonomous security fleet.

You will define how robots reason about environment, integrate embodied AI, learned planning, and real-time decision making in production. Responsibilities include advancing core AI capabilities across robotic platforms, applying vision-language-action models for improved safety reasoning, and mentoring engineers while shaping the autonomy architecture.

Qualifications

• 7+ years shipping autonomy, planning, or decision-making systems to production.
• Deep expertise in behavior planning and policy execution, imitation learning or RL for real-world robot control.
• Hands-on experience integrating learned planning or policy models with classical control systems and safety constraints.
• Strong software engineering in C++ and Python; familiarity with real-time autonomy stacks.
• Proven ability to take systems from research prototype to deployed production platform.
• Track record of driving architecture decisions across perception, planning, and controls teams.

Responsibilities

• Advance core AI and machine learning capabilities for embodied autonomy across deployed robotic platforms.
• Incorporate 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 to policy decisions that drive safe robot behavior.
• Build the closed-loop learning pipeline: production outcomes and operator feedback feed model evaluation and policy improvement.
• Drive technical architecture decisions across the autonomy stack and mentor engineers across the team.

Skills

C++

Python

Robotics

Autonomy

Education

MS or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, ML

Job description

Knightscope, Inc. is seeking a Staff Autonomy Engineer to own the intelligence-to-action loop for its autonomous security fleet.

You will define how robots reason about environment, integrate embodied AI, learned planning, and real-time decision making in production. Responsibilities include advancing core AI capabilities across robotic platforms, applying vision-language-action models for improved safety reasoning, and mentoring engineers while shaping the autonomy architecture.