Whole-Body Robotics Controls Engineer

GRAM; El Segundo (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

GRAM is seeking a Senior Robotics Controls Engineer in El Segundo to design and implement real-time, whole-body control architectures for insectoid machines. You will coordinate motion and contact across coupled DOFs with production C++ driving hardware.

You will build control-oriented models, perform system identification, and develop hardware-in-the-loop environments to validate controllers on the physical machine through rigorous testing and data-driven refinements.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in an engineering or related field or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience in feedback control for multi-DOF robots or nonlinear physical systems.
• Strong C++ and Python, with knowledge of rigid-body dynamics and numerical methods.
• Hands-on experience with a controls/dynamics stack (Drake, Pinocchio, MuJoCo, ROS 2 control, Eigen).
• Experience deploying a controller on hardware with measurable results and a redesign.

Responsibilities

• Design whole-body controllers coordinating motion and contact forces across coupled degrees of freedom.
• Implement real-time control software in C++ with explicit timing, numerical stability, saturation, and fault behavior.
• Develop control-oriented dynamics models, system-identification experiments, and actuator characterizations.
• Integrate state estimation, trajectory generation, manipulation, embedded systems, and safety logic into one testable control path.
• Define quantitative envelopes for tracking error, contact stability, disturbance rejection, transition success, compute latency, and recovery.
• Build controller simulations, hardware-in-the-loop tests, and physical-machine tests that reproduce failures and prevent regressions.
• Use test evidence to distinguish controller defects from estimation error, unmodeled dynamics, actuator limits, and mechanical faults.
• Document model validity and confirm simulated results on physical hardware.

Skills

C++

Python

Rigid-body dynamics

Control theory

Multi-DOF robotics

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

Drake

Pinocchio

MuJoCo

ROS 2 control

Eigen

Job description

GRAM is seeking a Senior Robotics Controls Engineer in El Segundo to design and implement real-time, whole-body control architectures for insectoid machines. You will coordinate motion and contact across coupled DOFs with production C++ driving hardware.

You will build control-oriented models, perform system identification, and develop hardware-in-the-loop environments to validate controllers on the physical machine through rigorous testing and data-driven refinements.