Staff Controls Software Engineer

About The Role

We're hiring a Staff Controls Software Engineer to join our Controls team based in London.

We are seeking an experienced Staff Controls Software Engineer to lead the development, integration, and maintenance of our production-grade control software for humanoid robotic systems.

This role sits at the intersection of controls and software engineering - focused on turning advanced control strategies into robust, maintainable, and validated production systems. You’ll be responsible for ensuring that the control stack powering our robots is deterministic, safe, tested, and deployable at scale.

You bring both deep robotics control experience (10 years in robotic system development) and strong software engineering discipline — designing architectures that perform reliably in real-time environments.

What You’ll Do

• Design and maintain modular, real-time control architectures supporting locomotion, manipulation, and teleoperation.
• Implement high-performance control loops and middleware interfaces for deterministic, safe operation.
• Industrialize algorithms, ensuring production readiness, maintainability, and performance.
• Establish clear software boundaries and interfaces between motion planning, control, and hardware layers.
• Translate research prototypes into scalable, maintainable, and testable control software.
• Apply modern software development practices (CI/CD, code reviews, testing frameworks, documentation).
• Define reliability, latency, and safety metrics and enforce them throughout the control stack.
• Lead the integration of real-time control software on embedded or Linux-based systems, ensuring consistent behavior across hardware targets.
• Develop automated testing frameworks (simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, regression, and performance testing).
• Drive release and version management of the control stack, ensuring stability across branches and deployments.
• Conduct profiling, benchmarking, and performance validation on robotic hardware.
• Define release protocols to ensure reproducibility and verifiable system behavior.
• Implement software-based fail-safes, watchdogs, and redundancy mechanisms for safety-critical control paths.
• Work closely with hardware and safety teams to ensure fault detection, graceful degradation, and safe state transitions.
• Lead by example through hands-on coding, code reviews, and system-level debugging.
• Mentor engineers on control software best practices, testing methodologies, and performance optimization.
• Contribute to the long-term control software roadmap, guiding architecture evolution and quality standards.

What We're Looking For

• B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Robotics, Control, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years of experience developing robotics control software for real-time systems.
• Proven expertise in C++ (modern standards) and Python for software implementation, testing, and automation.
• Strong background in control theory, robot kinematics & dynamics, and real-time control systems.
• Experience in deploying and validating control software both in simulation and on physical robotic platforms.
• Solid understanding of software architecture, version control (Git), CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing.
• Excellent debugging, profiling, and system performance optimization skills.
• Track record of shipping production-quality robotics software, not research prototypes.
• Proven experience managing software lifecycle, including release management and cross-team integration.

Nice to have:

• Experience with ROS2, real-time Linux, or RTOS environments.
• Familiarity with relevant tools and libraries like Eigen, Pinocchio, Placo, PyTorch, MuJoCo, etc.
• Familiarity with safety-critical systems, redundancy, and failover mechanisms.
• Background in whole-body control, actuator coordination, or real-time trajectory execution.
• Experience in Joint/Cartesian Impedance and force control
• Strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to influence architecture decisions and engineering culture.
• Experience in learning-based control methods (e.g. RL, imitation learning)

What We Offer

• Meaningful time off to rest and recharge: 23 days of annual leave (accrued), 15 days of paid sick leave, and paid company holidays.
• Fully funded private healthcare for UK employees, with broad provider access, virtual and in‑person care, and strong mental health and serious illness support.
• Equity included–we believe builders should share in what they build.
• Pension scheme with a total 8% contribution (5% employee, 3% employer) on full earnings.
• Free daily breakfast, catered lunch, and snacks in‑office.
• Collaboration with top‑tier engineers, researchers, and product experts in AI and robotics.
• Freedom to influence the product and own key initiatives.