Senior Robotics Engineer, Mission Autonomy

FieldAI • Irvine, CA

9d • $180,000 - $220,000 • Onsite

About The Position

FieldAI is seeking a rigorous and innovative Senior Robotic Autonomy Engineer for Mission Autonomy to develop advanced robotic and AI systems by designing and implementing intelligent decision-making frameworks. The role contributes to autonomous robotic platforms and AI-driven solutions for enterprise customers in a fast-paced environment. Based in Irvine, the team builds and tests systems on real hardware and sensors, then deploys them in unstructured, previously unknown environments. The work focuses on reliable, explainable, and safe autonomy for real-world use.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related field.
• Advanced proficiency in Python, C++, ROS or ROS 2, Linux, Git, and Docker.
• At least 5 years of experience with AI-driven autonomy software deployed on real robots, such as task and motion planning, VLM/LLM-based planners, state machines, or behavior trees.
• Low-level robotic manipulation skills.
• Ability to communicate effectively and efficiently with all teams and lead technical efforts across them.
• Strong problem-solving skills and a proven ability to navigate complex software systems.
• Strong work ethic, high self-motivation, and ability to work independently while managing multiple priorities.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with simulation environments such as Gazebo or Isaac Sim.
• Experience with heterogeneous multi-robot systems, including UGVs, UAVs, or mobile manipulators.
• Experience with LLM/VLM-based long-horizon planning and failure recovery in robotic systems.

Responsibilities

• Connect runtime perception outputs, such as semantic 3D scene understanding, with world information to create a unified semantic scene graph for perception-aware real-time mission planning and execution.
• Enable spatial reasoning, feasibility validation, online task replanning, and natural-language-driven robotic autonomy.
• Design and implement a VLM-based mission controller that observes the robot’s camera view and scene graph, reasons about mission progress, and selects actions using reusable primitives and tools.
• Implement step verification, failure detection and recovery, online replanning, and feedback handling for natural-language-driven long-horizon missions.
• Support development of a multi-robot mission autonomy framework for task allocation, execution monitoring, and coordination across heterogeneous robots.
• Expand the robotics testing framework through unit and integration tests to ensure system reliability, safety, and performance.
• Lead technical efforts across teams and communicate effectively with them.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree