Physical Intelligence

Physical Intelligence

Controls Engineer

San Francisco

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 196 days ago
PythonC++AlgorithmsEmbedded SystemsResearchCommunication

About the role

  • They work closely with research, hardware, and operations to debug complex system behaviors and ensure our learning-based systems operate under strict real-time constraints in unpredictable environments.

Responsibilities

  • Design & implement control algorithms: PID, LQR, MPC, inverse dynamics, and feedforward controllers.
  • Build & validate models: Create and refine physical and inverse dynamics models for simulation and control design.
  • Develop real-time loops: Write and optimize runtime control loops, including neural-network-driven control.
  • Own robotic bring-up: Integrate and tune arms, mobile bases, teleop systems, and full-body platforms.
  • Build sensor/actuator subsystems: Work with embedded systems, drivers, and communication protocols (CAN, SPI, I2C, Ethernet).
  • Partner cross-functionally: Work with researchers, platform engineers, and operators to ensure stable, predictable real-world behavior.
  • Support R&D: Prototype configurations, collect structured datasets, and iterate directly with researchers.
  • Ability to validate control approaches in simulation and translate them to real hardware
  • Ability to design or refine custom actuator or sensor hardware
  • As a Controls Engineer, you will design and implement the algorithms that make PI's robots behave predictably, smoothly, and safely under varied and uncertain conditions.

Requirements

  • Proficiency in Python and C++, including firmware-adjacent development

Benefits

  • Exposure to robot learning or integrating learned policies into control stacks
  • Bonus Points If You Have

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