Staff Robotics Engineer — Insectoid Manipulation Architect

GRAM; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

GRAM is a self-replication company building insectoid machines for physical labor in the San Francisco area. This staff-level role puts you in charge of the manipulation architecture, owning technical direction across planning, sensing, and execution while staying hands-on in C++ and Python.

You will lead cross-stack design reviews, mentor engineers, and push toward repeatable physical success with measurable improvements on real hardware.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in robotics, mechanical, electrical engineering, computer science, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Ownership of architecture and technical direction for a deployed manipulation system spanning planning, sensing, control, monitoring, and recovery.
• Strong C++ and Python skills, including experience with a robotics framework such as ROS 2, Drake, MoveIt, Pinocchio, or an equivalent internal stack.
• Built and deployed a closed-loop manipulation capability on a physical robot; you can explain its architecture and provide measured results from repeated trials.
• Led a failure-driven redesign that separated planning, perception, control, and hardware causes and produced a correction that survived repeated physical test.

Responsibilities

• Set the manipulation architecture and technical direction across task planning, sensing, learned-policy integration, contact reasoning, monitoring, recovery, and execution.
• Design manipulation behaviors for contact-rich tasks, including contact selection, constrained motion, force regulation, and recovery.
• Integrate and evaluate learned manipulation policies, including vision-language-action models and other embodied foundation models, through the full sensing, control, monitoring, and recovery stack.
• Implement production-quality planning and execution software in C++ and Python for real-time operation on insectoids.
• Lead cross-stack design reviews and resolve tradeoffs spanning sensing, control, actuation, operator interfaces, and mechanical constraints.
• Build task-level monitors that detect loss of contact, geometric mismatch, saturation, obstruction, and unsuccessful execution.
• Define hardware experiments, metrics, and regression tests for completion rate, cycle time, force accuracy, recovery rate, and failure mode.
• Analyze unsuccessful trials and convert the dominant causes into algorithm, sensing, controller, or mechanical changes that survive repeated physical test.

Skills

C++

Python

ROS 2 / MoveIt

System architecture ownership

Hardware integration

Education

Bachelor's degree in robotics or related field

Tools

ROS 2

Drake

MoveIt

Pinocchio

Job description

GRAM is a self-replication company building insectoid machines for physical labor in the San Francisco area. This staff-level role puts you in charge of the manipulation architecture, owning technical direction across planning, sensing, and execution while staying hands-on in C++ and Python.

You will lead cross-stack design reviews, mentor engineers, and push toward repeatable physical success with measurable improvements on real hardware.