Senior Robotics Software Engineer, Autonomy

Persona AI Inc • Houston, TX

1d

About The Position

Persona AI is building rugged humanoid robots for demanding heavy-industry environments, including shipyards, steel mills, fabrication facilities, and offshore platforms. The Senior Robotics Software Engineer, Autonomy will help design and build the autonomy stack that allows humanoid robots to understand industrial job sites, turn high-level objectives into executable plans, perform tasks safely and reactively, and adapt to changing conditions. The role combines world modeling with established autonomy techniques, with work spanning simulation through deployment at live industrial sites. Robot behavior is trained on representative tasks and environments, then refined and validated in digital-twin simulations of customer facilities before deployment.

The engineer will develop autonomy and behavior-coordination algorithms, integrate robot skills from manipulation, navigation, perception, and teleoperation, and create systems for safe, adaptable, and explainable plan execution. The position also contributes to robot safety and health monitoring, behavior evaluation and regression testing, and data pipelines for industrial tasks and humanoid world-model post-training.

Requirements

• MS or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field.
• At least 5 years of professional experience in robotics, primarily focused on autonomy.
• Experience with plan-execution approaches such as behavior trees and state machines.
• Strong hands-on experience with NVIDIA IsaacSim and MuJoCo for robotic simulation.
• Strong fundamentals in Python, C++, data structures and algorithms, Git, code review, and CI/CD.
• Experience with synthetic data generation, data curation, and benchmark evaluation.

Nice To Haves

• Exposure to humanoid robot locomotion, navigation, manipulation, or perception.
• Experience with NVIDIA Isaac Lab for reinforcement-learning environment setup and training.
• Experience with ROS2 libraries for autonomous planning and navigation.
• Experience with generative and symbolic planning approaches.
• Experience using VLAs/VLMs to generate task plans for autonomous robots.
• World-model benchmarking and post-training experience in a robotics domain.
• Experience applying world models to planning, reasoning, and scene understanding, such as NVIDIA Cosmos.
• Experience with semantic mapping and scene understanding for autonomous mobile robots.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement autonomy and behavior-coordination algorithms for an industrial humanoid platform.
• Work with manipulation, navigation, perception, and teleoperation engineers to integrate robot skills into autonomous behaviors.
• Develop plan-execution approaches combining classical control and learned policies.
• Design and implement behavior execution that is reactive, safe, adaptable, and explainable.
• Integrate autonomy with robot safety, health monitoring, bring-up, and safe shutdown.
• Design and implement pipelines for autonomous behavior evaluation, benchmarking, and regression testing.
• Implement data-curation pipelines that help robots understand a variety of real-world industrial tasks.
• Develop synthetic-data-generation pipelines for post-training humanoid world models.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation.
• Performance-based bonus.
• 100% employer-covered medical benefits for most healthcare plans.
• Early-stage equity.
• Competitive PTO.
• Company-wide paid winter break between December 24 and January 2.

What This Job Offers

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