Robotics Controls Engineer

Humanoid • Cambridge, MA

2d • Onsite

About The Position

Humanoid is seeking a Controls Engineer to join its Control Team in Boston and help develop and validate the controls stack for HMND-01, a humanoid robot platform deployed in industrial environments. The role owns testing and validation infrastructure, runtime observability and failure analysis, and engineering documentation and runbooks. It also contributes to first-time bring-up of new hardware for Boston components and validates changes end-to-end on real robots. The engineer works across the controls stack and provides measured, reproducible assessments of software and hardware behavior.

Requirements

• Substantial hands-on robotics experience on real hardware.
• Strong control theory foundation, including joint-space control, PID and feedforward, impedance/admittance, observers, state estimation, filtering, and stability.
• Ability to define meaningful repeatability and accuracy metrics for a control stack and interpret the results.
• Experience shipping software across the stack, including modern C++ in a real-time control codebase and Python for test harnesses, analysis, and tooling.
• Experience building test automation, HIL, or integration-test infrastructure for complex physical systems and getting other engineers to use it.
• Sound measurement and data-analysis judgment, including sampling, timing and synchronization, noise, statistical significance, and evaluating whether run-to-run differences are real.
• Strong debugging skills across software, firmware, and hardware boundaries, including the discipline to reproduce failures in actionable formats for other engineers.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with physics simulation environments such as MuJoCo or Isaac Sim/Isaac Lab, and sim-to-real validation.
• Experience with observability tooling such as logging and tracing frameworks, metrics collection, time-series databases, and dashboarding tools such as Grafana.
• First-time hardware bring-up experience, including integrating new actuators, sensors, or compute targets into a control stack.
• A track record of producing engineering documentation and runbooks that remain useful after their author has moved on.
• Experience with release management or quality gates for safety-relevant software.

Responsibilities

• Build and own hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and integration test workflows that measure controller and motion repeatability and accuracy.
• Define repeatability and accuracy metrics and develop harnesses that make measurements consistent across runs and robots.
• Expand unit and integration test coverage for actuator drivers, hardware interfaces, whole-body control, and the teleoperation pipeline.
• Develop automated regression checks in simulation and on hardware to identify controls regressions before broader team use.
• Work with controls engineers to define testability requirements for new components and algorithms.
• Package controllers into separable, reusable, testable interfaces so they can be developed, swapped, and validated in isolation.
• Contribute to first-time bring-up of new hardware for Boston components and integrate it into the controls stack.
• Validate hardware and software changes end-to-end on real robots using structured, documented, repeatable processes.
• Instrument the controls stack with logging, tracing, and diagnostic tools to improve visibility into runtime behavior.
• Reproduce hardware and software failures in structured formats that developers can share, and provide root-cause context to algorithm and hardware owners.
• Identify and resolve failure modes spanning controls, firmware, and hardware.
• Write and maintain controls-stack engineering documentation, including HIL and test coverage information and hardware bring-up and integration guides.
• Maintain runbooks that enable controls engineers to perform validation, integration, and recovery without relying on institutional knowledge.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health coverage for US-based employees, including fully paid medical, dental, and vision insurance, virtual care, and employee assistance resources.
• 23 days of accrued PTO, separate sick leave, and paid company holidays.
• 401(k) retirement plan with a 4% employer match.
• Stock options with meaningful upside as the company scales.
• Free daily catered lunch, snacks, and drinks in the office.
• Collaboration with engineers, researchers, and product experts in AI and robotics.
• Freedom to influence the product and own key initiatives.

What This Job Offers

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