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Clera

Senior Robotics Engineer, Controls

San Francisco
Salary
$180,000 - $200,000 annually
Level
Senior
Work type
On-site · San Francisco
Visa
Not offered

Open. First seen 21 October 2026.

Apply on the company's site →

About the role

About the Role

Join a small engineering team at a defense technology company developing autonomous systems to counter drone threats. As a senior individual contributor, you will own the precision motion control stack, from control architecture and state estimation to hardware testing and field characterization.

What You'll Do

  • Design and tune precision pointing and tracking control loops, including closed-loop control from sensor input to actuator command.
  • Build state estimation and sensor fusion across IMUs, encoders, and vision feedback.
  • Identify and model gimbal, mount, and actuator dynamics, then compensate for resonance, backlash, friction, saturation, and other nonlinearities.
  • Develop simulation and hardware-in-the-loop infrastructure to validate controls and reduce the sim-to-real gap.
  • Characterize system performance on hardware and during field testing, and document control designs and tuning standards.

What We're Looking For

  • At least 4 years of robotics experience, including designing and tuning closed-loop controllers on physical motion hardware.
  • Strong grounding in classical and state-space control, including LQR and MPC, with experience applying these methods to real systems.
  • Hands-on state estimation and sensor fusion experience using Kalman, EKF, UKF, or complementary filters.
  • Experience with system identification, frequency-domain tuning, resonance compensation, and managing latency and jitter in real-time loops.
  • Modern C++ for real-time control, plus Python or MATLAB/Simulink for modeling and analysis.
  • Familiarity with servo drives, brushless motors, encoders, and IMUs, and the ability to work across mechanical, electrical, and software disciplines.
  • Experience building control simulations and validating them against hardware.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $180,000 to $200,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.

What this role asks for

Particular to this role

MATLAB · Simulink

Rare in Clera's other 299 open postings.

Standard for embedded / hardware roles

C++ · Python

Common in embedded / hardware postings at any company.

Compared with Clera's other open jobs.

The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY

This role is one of 385 open in Engineering. 319 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in March: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.

WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS

LLM (162 of 385), Python (160 of 385), TypeScript (151 of 385), React (122 of 385), Machine Learning (92 of 385), PostgreSQL (70 of 385), JavaScript (66 of 385)

OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM

From the team and dates on Clera's own job board.

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