Senior Controls Engineer

We’re looking for a seasoned controls engineer to own control quality across our robotic products through best-in-class, modern engineering practices. In this role, you will operate at the boundary between hardware and software — the layer between electrical engineering and motion planning — working closely with electrical, firmware, and higher-level software teams to deliver smooth, reliable, and precisely characterized motion.

Responsibilities

• Own control performance across our products: smooth motion, tracking accuracy, and high-fidelity impedance control
• Design and own control-loop benchmarking and validation — loop rates, synchronization jitter, tracking error — across communication architectures such as CAN and EtherCAT
• Analytically model in-house actuator Motor -> Gearbox -> Feedback Plants, verify model through physical testing, and determine appropriate Plant tolerance bands for production that maintains model fidelity.
• Implement and document safety-rated monitoring and stop functions to certification rigor
• Ensure maximal servo performance while maintaining stability and rejecting disturbances and suppressing vibration under a broad range of dynamic loading conditions.
• Debug complex system-level issues where root cause may span software, firmware, electrical, or component behavior
• Build test and diagnostic tooling for tuning, hardware characterization, and fault injection
• Act as a technical bridge between hardware and software, advising leadership on technical strategy and mentoring engineers across teams

Software Stack and Ownership Areas The Controls & Firmware group focuses on foundational technologies including motor and actuator control, embedded communications, system health monitoring/logging, and hardware bring-up.

Tech Stack

• MCUs: STM32
• Languages: C / C++, MATLAB/Simulink
• RTOS: FreeRTOS or similar
• Communications: CAN, EtherCAT
• Supporting Systems: Linux, modern CI/CD tooling

Who you are We’re looking for engineers who are self-driven, optimistic, creative, and resourceful — excited to apply deep controls expertise to a new class of robotic products.

Skills you'll bring

• Strong classical controls fundamentals —analytical and heuristic tuning, plant and controller modelling, gain and phase margin analysis, bandwidth modelling and testing — along with real-time signal processing and filtering
• Enough understanding of firmware, electrical, and mechanical systems to find and resolve issues at the borders between them
• 5+ years of proven experience modelling control systems, tuning control loops on real-world systems, and validating models through physical experiments on benchtop equipment
• You excel in written and verbal communication and enjoy leveraging your skills to support your peers
• You relentlessly seek user impact and value execution over technical idealism
• You prioritize simplicity, reliability, and velocity and proactively identify opportunities to improve incumbent systems

Nice to have

• Experience with modern control techniques like MPC
• Experience with sensors, especially encoders, and sensor fusion
• Experience interfacing with robotic motion planning systems
• Electrical and board-level experience — comfort with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and DMMs to diagnose timing, signaling, and electrical issues.