Knightscope

Staff ML Engineer, Autonomy & Planning

Sunnyvale, California · Staff+ · Full-time

Sponsorship not specified$240k-$275kDetected 38 days ago

PythonC++Machine LearningComputer VisionMLOpsRoboticsControlsResearch

About the role

The gap between a robot that observes and a robot that acts is the intelligence layer.
You will define how our robot's reason about their environment and respond, drawing on the latest advances in embodied AI, learned planning, and real-time decision making.
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.

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.
Drive technical architecture decisions across the autonomy stack and mentor engineers across the team.
from sensor observations through entity reasoning, world-state modeling, to policy decisions that drive safe, bounded robot behavior.
This is not a role where you own one slice of a large stack.

7+ years shipping autonomy, planning, or decision-making systems to production in robotics, autonomous vehicles, or safety-critical platforms.
Hands-on experience integrating learned planning or policy models with classical control systems and deterministic safety constraints.
experience with 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 controls teams.

Experience with autonomous vehicles, deployed robotics, or embodied AI systems in production.
Familiarity with VLA architectures, foundation models for robot control, or large-scale pre-trained policies adapted for real-world deployment.
Familiarity with functional safety standards, ISO 26262 or SOTIF.

Medical, dental, vision, 401(k), paid time off
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.
Build the closed-loop learning pipeline: production outcomes and operator feedback feed model evaluation and policy improvement without modifying safety-critical boundaries.
You will architect and ship the full intelligence-to-action loop on a deployed production fleet and build the learning pipeline that makes it better with every mission.
Equity: Stock options

About Knightscope
Knightscope is a security technology company building the nation's first Autonomous Security Force.
The Company combines autonomous machines, advanced software, and human expertise to help protect people, property, and critical infrastructure.
Knightscope's long-term mission is to make the United States of America the safest country in the world.
We are looking for a Staff Autonomy Engineer to own this layer end to end.

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