Senior Robotics Engineer, Mission Autonomy

FieldAI • Irvine, CA

1d • Onsite

About The Position

FieldAI is seeking a rigorous and innovative Senior Robotic Autonomy Engineer for Mission Autonomy to help develop advanced robotic and AI systems. The role designs and implements intelligent decision-making frameworks for autonomous robotic platforms and customer-facing solutions. The Irvine team builds, tests, and deploys field-ready AI systems on real robots, sensors, and hardware, focusing on reliable operation in unstructured, previously unknown environments. The position works across disciplines and teams to advance dependable, explainable, and safety-focused autonomy.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related field.
• Advanced proficiency in Python, C++, ROS/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 proven ability to navigate complex software systems.
• Strong work ethic, 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, such as UGVs, UAVs, or mobile manipulators.
• Experience with LLM/VLM-based long-horizon planning and failure recovery in robotic systems.

Responsibilities

• Combine runtime perception outputs, such as semantic 3D scene understanding, with world information to create a unified semantic scene graph.
• Enable perception-aware, real-time mission planning and execution, including spatial reasoning, feasibility validation, online task replanning, and natural-language-driven autonomy.
• Design and implement a VLM-based mission controller that uses the robot’s camera view and scene graph to reason about mission progress and choose actions from 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 with unit and integration tests to ensure reliability, safety, and performance.
• Communicate and lead technical efforts across teams.

What This Job Offers

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