Senior Robotics Engineer, Task Planning & Autonomy

Job Description

Senior Robotics Engineer, Task Planning & Autonomy

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Chicago, IL - On site

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Up to $180k + equity

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Visa sponsorship and relocation support

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The company

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A well funded construction robotics company building AI powered robots that manufacture.

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The role

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You’ll own how the robots decide what to do next. A planning layer already exists; your job is to make it scalable, production ready and able to work across both robot product lines.

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Every robot action comes down to two primitives: move or actuate. You’ll build the planner that reasons over a goal, sequences those primitives, picks classical control or a learned policy for each step, and recovers when something goes wrong. The aim is simple: a robot finishes a whole panel or room on its own.

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This is the first of three principal level hires (alongside Robot Learning and World Sensing), so you’ll be shaping the foundation the rest of the autonomy stack is built on.

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What you’ll do

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• Define the primitive library and the contract between planner and executor
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• Build the task graph from BIM models: what’s in front of the robot and what depends on what
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• Build a two layer planner: a reasoning layer (LLM / reasoning models) for open ended decisions, plus solvers for reach, collision and trajectory
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• Decide where reasoning models help and where they don’t, and keep them off the real time control path
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• Build execution monitoring and recovery: verify, retry, switch approach, flag or escalate to a person
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• Log every decision with its reasoning so any outcome can be explained
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• Design for two robots sharing one task (one holds, one fastens)
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• Set autonomy architecture, mentor engineers, and still write production code and test on real robots every week
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What you’ll bring

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• 5+ years building autonomy, task planning or decision making systems for robots or AVs, deployed in production
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• Hands on manipulation experience with real hardware, ideally end effectors in unstructured environments
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• Task level planning: behavior trees, TAMP, HTN or similar
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• Execution monitoring and fault recovery on a deployed system
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• Hands on with LLMs or reasoning models in a robot decision loop
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• Strong Python and C++, ROS2, Linux, Docker, CI/CD
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• Real ownership: you built it, not just contributed to it. Startup or small team experience is a big plus
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• Experience setting technical direction and mentoring senior engineers
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Nice to have

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• MS or PhD in Robotics, CS or AI
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• Navigation as well as manipulation
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• MoveIt, OMPL or trajectory optimisation
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• Multi robot coordination or fleet orchestration
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• Functional safety or formal verification
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• CAD / BIM experience, or a background in construction, manufacturing or industrial automation
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What’s on offer

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• Base salary up to $200k
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• Equity
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• Comprehensive benefits
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• Visa sponsorship and relocation support
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• Direct access to robots, sensors and manufacturing environments every week
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• A rare problem: agentic planning on physical robots, in messy real world sites
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