Engineering Manager - Controls

Apptronik • Austin, TX

8d

About The Position

The Engineering Manager - Controls leads a team of software engineers responsible for the real-time control software running on Apptronik’s humanoid robots. The role is accountable for people leadership and delivery, including hiring and developing engineers, driving deliverables within the Controls roadmap, and ensuring the control stack is reliable, well tested, and production ready.

This is a player-leader role requiring a strong background in robot control and real-time software. The manager stays engaged in technical work by reviewing designs and unblocking engineers, while partnering with firmware, embedded software, learning, teleoperation, systems, and test teams to bring capabilities from simulation onto the robot fleet.

Requirements

• Strong foundation in robot kinematics, dynamics, and control, with hands-on experience in areas such as whole-body control, manipulation, or teleoperation.
• Experience building or leading development of real-time robotic software in C++, including multithreaded execution, timing, and hardware interfaces.
• Track record of taking control software from simulation to physical robots and supporting it in testing and deployment.
• Experience managing or leading engineers, including hiring, mentoring, performance feedback, and setting team priorities.
• Experience planning and delivering software in a fast-moving R&D environment while balancing near-term deliverables with long-term code health.
• MS or PhD in Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field.
• At least 4 years of relevant industry experience in robot controls or robotics software, or at least 2 years with a PhD.
• At least 1 year managing engineers and 2 years as a technical lead.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with humanoid, legged, or mobile manipulation platforms.
• Experience with state estimation and system identification for robotic systems.
• Experience integrating reinforcement learning or other learned policies into a real-time control stack.
• Experience with physics engines such as MuJoCo, IsaacSim, or Drake.
• Experience with hardware-in-the-loop testing, continuous integration, and release processes for robotics software.
• Familiarity with ROS 2 or similar robotics middleware.

Responsibilities

• Oversee development of the real-time control framework, including robot drivers, state estimation, control interfaces, and integration of learned policies and teleoperation.
• Plan and drive team deliverables in coordination with other leads across the Controls roadmap; break program goals into work, track milestones, and raise schedule or quality risks early.
• Hire, manage, and mentor controls and software engineers; set priorities and ownership, provide regular feedback, and develop engineers and technical leads.
• Maintain code quality through design reviews, code reviews, and automated testing, including simulation and hardware-in-the-loop regression tests.
• Own the team’s contribution to the software release process and the stability of software shipped to the robot fleet.
• Keep control software and tooling efficient for trying new approaches in simulation and on hardware.
• Ensure the control stack behaves consistently in simulation and on hardware; support robot bring-up, calibration tooling, and root-cause analysis of issues found in testing and in the field.
• Partner with firmware, embedded software, learning, teleoperation, systems, and test teams to align interfaces, priorities, and schedules, and represent the team in stakeholder reviews.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager