Staff Software Engineer (Humanoid Controls)

Join Apptronik, a company dedicated to building robots that improve human quality of life and address the labor shortage. As a Staff Software Engineer in Humanoid Controls, you will be a key technical leader on the Motion Control & Planning team, responsible for advancing whole-body control, raising the quality of the controls stack, and mentoring other engineers. You will collaborate cross-functionally with hardware, systems, and reinforcement learning teams to develop solutions and diagnose system-level issues.

• Raise the quality of the overall controls stack, including architecture, algorithms, real-time performance, testing, and long-term maintainability.
• Advance whole-body control across wheeled-base and biped platforms, coordinating base or legs with upper-body manipulation.
• Set technical direction across the controls stack, influencing the roadmap and bringing adjacent teams along.

• Hands-on experience with learning-based control / reinforcement learning applied to robotics (training in simulation)
• 8+ years of relevant industry experience (or 4+ with a PhD) in robot controls, with a track record of getting controllers working on physical hardware
• EDUCATION and/or EXPERIENCE
• Preferred: shipping controllers to a production fleet or to market at scale; dexterous / in-hand manipulation; legged locomotion; or safety-critical / certified software (ISO 13849, 10218, IEC 61508)
• Breadth across robot control problems — mobile manipulation, dexterity / hand control, and teleoperation — and the versatility to move between them
• Industry experience developing production-grade controllers, including hands-on experience validating or deploying algorithms on physical robot hardware
• Strong software engineering: real-time C++ and Python for robotic systems
• MS or PhD in Robotics, CS, EE, ME, or a related field (or equivalent experience)
• Deep robotics fundamentals: kinematics, dynamics, state estimation, and optimization/control theory
• Proven expertise in whole-body control (WBC/OSC, QP-based control, or MPC) for floating-base (legged) or mobile (wheeled) systems