Robotics Engineer, Mission Autonomy

Andromeda Robotics•San Francisco, CA

4h•$200,000 - $240,000

About The Position

Andromeda is building a social intelligence layer for humanoid robots. Its first robot, Abi, is deployed in aged care and healthcare, providing conversation, companionship, and engagement. As the company scales to operate across thousands of real-world environments, it is hiring a Robotics Engineer to build the decision layer that enables Abi to operate across a full shift: deciding what to do next, responding to changing context, coordinating conversation and robotics capabilities, and safely recovering when plans fail. The engineer will define the architecture and technical roadmap for long-horizon, mission-level decision-making, evaluate approaches such as agent systems, structured planners, world models, and vision-language-action methods, and build reusable actions and interfaces for executable plans. The role also includes coordinating Abi’s underlying systems, designing recovery and degraded-operation behaviors, and creating simulation-first prototypes and evaluation methods. The engineer will establish a repeatable path from simulation to robot testing and work hands-on with Abi alongside teams responsible for voice, mobile autonomy, perception, gestures, audio, and platform systems.

Requirements

At least 5 years building robotics or autonomous systems, or equivalent practical experience.
Evidence of deploying autonomous robots or systems that operate autonomously for extended periods, from tens of minutes to multiple hours.
Experience taking an autonomy capability from prototype through testing and deployment on a physical system.
Strong software engineering skills in Python, C++, or Rust, with sound judgment around architecture, interfaces, and testing.
Experience with robotics middleware, such as ROS 2, and understanding of its limitations.
Experience using simulation tools such as Isaac Sim, Gazebo, MuJoCo, or comparable tools to verify and validate autonomous systems and characterize failure modes.
Practical robotics skills, including debugging hardware, sensors, actuators, and runtime behavior on a robot.
Ability to reason clearly about reliability and safety when robots operate around people.
Strong communication and technical influence, including aligning teams around interfaces and decisions without owning every part of the system.

Nice To Haves

An advanced degree is welcome, but is not a substitute for demonstrated engineering depth.
Experience with long-horizon robotic task planning, behavior orchestration, agent tool use, or error recovery using LLMs, VLMs, or related methods.
Experience with planning and behavior architectures such as task-and-motion planning, PDDL, behavior trees, or state machines.
Experience with simulation-based evaluation, including scenario design, metrics, failure taxonomies, and reporting.
Experience in human-robot interaction or deploying robots in care, service, field, warehouse, or other human-facing environments.
Experience de-rosifying systems.

Responsibilities

Set the architecture and technical roadmap for long-horizon, mission-level decision-making on Abi.
Explore and evaluate agent systems, structured planners, world models, and vision-language-action methods, selecting approaches suited to Abi’s operating constraints.
Turn goals and context into executable plans using reusable actions, and specify action interfaces, preconditions, success signals, and failure behavior.
Orchestrate Abi’s conversation, perception, audio, navigation, gestures, and operator systems while preserving context for coherent behavior.
Design replanning, recovery, and degraded-operation behaviors so Abi responds safely and usefully when people are unavailable or subsystems fail, and makes situations legible to operators.
Build a simulation-first prototype and evaluation system, including scenarios, benchmarks, replay, and failure analysis to measure task completion, interventions, recovery, and autonomy limitations.
Establish a repeatable path from simulation to robot testing, including observability, test gates, configuration, and rollback.
Work hands-on with Abi and collaborate with the teams responsible for voice, mobile autonomy, perception, gestures, audio, and platform systems.