Controls Engineer (Robotics)

Tutor Intelligence • Watertown, MA

7d

About The Position

We are seeking a Controls Engineer to own the safety-critical control code for our robots. This role involves ensuring the safe operation of robot arms by managing joint limits, speed limits, stopping distances and times, and contact/collision behavior. The engineer will be responsible for the control loop that translates motion commands into torque and monitors for misbehavior. This is a software-intensive role within a rapidly evolving codebase, requiring a strong understanding of physics and experience with safety-critical systems where mistakes have physical consequences. The engineer will also build and maintain a hardware-in-the-loop test bench for continuous integration and manage the documentation and evidence supporting the safety of the system.

Requirements

• Real-time control experience on physical systems: Robot arms, vehicles, aircraft, or similar. You have written control code that moved hardware and handled its failures
• Experience in a mission-critical codebase: You have written and organized a large amount of code where mistakes had physical consequences, and you know what that requires of structure, testing, and review
• Comfortable with the physics: Dynamics, torque, inertia, stopping distances, contact. You can reason about what the arm will do
• Strong systems software: C++ and Python or similar, real-time behavior on Linux, and safety-critical code kept separate from the rest
• Experience with hardware-in-the-loop testing: You have built or used a rig that put real hardware in the loop with software under test

Nice To Haves

• Exposure to safety standards for robots or machinery, such as ISO 10218, ISO 13849, or ANSI/RIA R15.06
• EtherCAT or other fieldbus experience with servo drives
• Experience with safety-rated controllers or certified functional safety components
• Experience in warehouses, manufacturing, or other environments where robots and people share space

Responsibilities

• Own the safety-critical control code for our arms: Limits, stop behavior, collision response, and the monitoring around the control loop
• Work on the control loop itself: Timing, stability, and failure modes, from the motion command down to the drives
• Organize the code so it can be trusted: Keep the safety-critical parts small, separated, tested, and reviewable, and set the rules for how other code touches them
• Build hardware-in-the-loop testing: A bench and a continuous-integration path that run the control code against real arms and real safety hardware
• Keep the evidence current: Stopping-time measurements and the tests behind the safety argument, updated whenever the code or the hardware changes
• Document the design: Decisions, limits, and the reasons for them, in a form other engineers follow

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed