Watney Robotics Inc

Senior Controls Engineer

San Francisco · Senior

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 22 days ago

AlgorithmsRoboticsResearch

About the role

Your work will directly unlock a new class of robot capabilities with a uniquely high bar across precision, stability, and compliance while operating in unstructured environments such as warehouses, factories, and data centers.
We're looking for someone with technical rigor and sharp engineering instincts who is equally comfortable deploying to robots in production, not just simulation.
You should be able to derive controller formulations on a whiteboard, reason about what can cause closed-loop instability, understand and navigate large codebases.

Own the control stack end-to-end: design, implement, and tune low-level controllers (i.e. PID,H2/H-infinity) and optimal control schemes (i.e. MPC) making sure they run reliably and high frequencies.
Own fleet controls metrics and guarantee its performance: evaluate and implement metrics that guarantee high-tracking accuracy and consistent behavior for all of our robots. This includes deploying adaptive-control and auto-tuning schemes to the entire fleet.
Build our robots' autonomous navigation capabilities: implement optimization and sampling based path planning while localizing and mapping the environment using onboard sensors.
Close the loop with the field: partner with research, hardware, and deployment teams to diagnose real-world failures and translate them into more robust onboard behavior.
Have formulated and designed optimal and robust control algorithms (robust/stochastic MPC) and understand the tradeoffs between them.
We're committed to building a diverse, inclusive team.

Have worked with real-time, low-latency systems and are comfortable profiling and optimizing performance-critical code.
Have worked with real-world sensors and built estimators, filters, and sensor-fusion pipelines.
Have implemented localization and mapping algorithms (SLAM, UKF) for wheeled or legged robots.
Have a strong mathematical foundation in linear algebra, calculus, and convex optimization.

Expand human ambition in the physical world.
Critical infrastructure is constrained by labor shortages, hazardous working conditions, and operational complexity.
Watney builds and deploys autonomous robotic systems that increase the speed and capacity of buildout, starting with data centers.
At Watney Robotics, we welcome people of all backgrounds and identities, and we make hiring decisions based on skills, experience, and potential.

This listing is sourced directly from Watney Robotics Inc's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.