RoboForce
Senior / Staff Robotics Engineer, Motion Planning
Milpitas, CA · Staff+ · Full-time
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odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
$10,830 more — $170,830 — moves this role to Level III and 3 lottery entries. That figure is inside the range the employer already advertised.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $170,830 would place this position at wage Level III. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Engineers, All Other" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Engineers, All Other (17-2199) · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
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Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.
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About the role
- The company's robots are engineered for demanding industrial environments, with a focus on real-world deployment and scalability.
- In this role, you will bridge the gap between AI-driven perception and physical hardware execution.
- You will consume traversability and semantic costmaps generated by our AI team and translate them into safe, dynamically feasible, and deterministic motion.
Responsibilities
- Dynamic Motion Planning: Architect and implement advanced local planners (e.g., optimization-based approaches like MPC, MPPI, or custom contouring control) that translate AI-generated routes into trajectories that a heavy, non-holonomic base can physically execute on uneven terrain.
- AI Integration & Costmap Consumption: Build the high-performance C++ pipelines that ingest the AI team's neural network outputs (semantic maps, learned costmaps) in real-time and convert them into deterministic mathematical constraints for the planner.
- Deterministic Safety Architectures: AI models hallucinate. You will build the deterministic C++ safety layer and fallback behaviors that override AI inputs if a commanded path violates physical safety constraints or if off-the-shelf SLAM tracking drops.
- RoboForce is an AI robotics company developing Physical AI-powered Robo-Labor for dull, dirty, and dangerous work.
- Architect and implement advanced local planners (e.g., optimization-based approaches like MPC, MPPI, or custom contouring control) that translate AI-generated routes into trajectories that a heavy, non-holonomic base can physically execute on uneven terrain.
- Build the high-performance C++ pipelines that ingest the AI team's neural network outputs (semantic maps, learned costmaps) in real-time and convert them into deterministic mathematical constraints for the planner.
- You will build the deterministic C++ safety layer and fallback behaviors that override AI inputs if a commanded path violates physical safety constraints or if off-the-shelf SLAM tracking drops.
- Visa sponsorship and green card support for qualified candidates.
- Lunches and dinners, a fully stocked kitchen, and regular team-building events.
Requirements
- Rigid Body Dynamics: Strong understanding of kinematics, vehicle dynamics, and center-of-mass constraints for top-heavy mobile robots operating on uneven outdoor terrain.
- C++ Performance Engineering: Expertise in modern C++ (C++17/20), with strict attention to real-time performance, memory management, and low-latency execution.
- You must be comfortable bridging high-latency AI outputs with hard real-time control loops.
- You are solving the physics of mobility on unpredictable terrain, ensuring our humanoid platform respects its physical limits, shifting center of mass, and traction constraints.
Nice to have
- WBC / Manipulation: Familiarity with Whole-Body Control frameworks, operational space control, and how mobile bases synchronize with high-DOF manipulators.
- Applied SLAM / State Estimation: Experience tuning, debugging, or filtering outputs from commercial SLAM/VIO systems when they fail in visually degraded environments.
- Slip & Traction Estimation: Background in detecting slip or loss of traction from proprioceptive sensor signals and adapting planning constraints accordingly.
- GPU Acceleration: Experience using CUDA to accelerate grid processing or trajectory sampling pipelines.
Compensation
- Salary $160,000-$265,000 USD + Bonus + Equity
- The base salary range above represents the expected compensation for this full-time U.S. position.
- Final compensation will be determined based on role scope, level, location, job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training, and may fall outside the listed range in exceptional cases.
Benefits
- Competitive stock options/equity programs.
- Health, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) plan.
- Compensation: Salary $160,000-$265,000 USD + Bonus + Equity
- Final compensation will be determined based on role scope, level, location, job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training, and may fall outside the listed range in exceptional cases.
Company info
- We are seeking a Senior / Staff Robotics Engineer, Motion Planning to own the local mobility and safety stack for our fleet.
Visa & Work Authorization
- Visa sponsorship and green card support for qualified candidates.
This listing is sourced directly from RoboForce's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.