Robotics & AI Engineer Job Description Template

The robotics and AI engineer builds intelligence into physical systems, combining perception, planning and control with the constraints of real hardware. The domain is unforgiving because mistakes have physical consequences, sensors are noisy, and the gap between simulation and reality is a permanent engineering problem rather than something that gets solved once.

Typical Duties and Responsibilities

• Develop perception, planning and control software for robotic systems
• Integrate sensor data including cameras, lidar and inertial measurement
• Implement and tune control algorithms
• Build simulation environments and address the transfer gap to hardware
• Test on hardware safely with appropriate safeguards
• Implement safety systems and fail safe behavior
• Debug across the boundary between software, sensors and actuators
• Optimize for the compute available on the platform
• Collect and analyze operational data to improve behavior
• Document system behavior, limits and safety assumptions

Education

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in robotics, computer science, electrical engineering or a related field

Required Skills and Experience

• 3+ years in robotics software development
• Strong C++ and Python
• Experience with ROS or a comparable robotics framework
• Understanding of perception, state estimation and control
• Experience testing on real hardware, not simulation alone
• Awareness of safety requirements for physical systems
• Ability to debug across software and hardware
• Realism about the simulation to reality gap

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with autonomous navigation or manipulation
• Background in a safety critical domain