Control Systems Software Engineer
San Francisco, United States · On-site · Full-time
- Posted 1mo ago
- From OpenAI’s careers page
- Location
- San Francisco, United States
- Work mode
- On-site
- Type
- Full-time
- Level
- Senior
- Experience
- 2+ years
- Department
- Research and Development (R&D)
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About the role
About the Team
Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives.
About the Role
We’re looking for a Robotics Control Systems Engineer to take on a foundational role within our robotics team. You’ll help architect, implement, tune, and verify the control infrastructure that enables intelligent, reliable, and responsive robot behavior.
This is a deeply hands-on role focused on real-time systems, actuation, dynamics, low-level hardware interaction, and whole-robot performance. You’ll spend significant time working directly with robots onsite: debugging behavior, tuning subsystems, running experiments, and providing feedback across mechanical, electrical, and software teams.
In this role, you will:
- Design and implement real-time control algorithms for robotic systems, including motion control, feedback loops, state estimation, actuator control, and subsystem tuning.
- Define the control architecture from low-level actuators and hardware interfaces through whole-robot behavior and policy.
- Identify and characterize actuator, hardware, and software parameters through rigorous experimentation, testing, commissioning, and verification.
- Work with machine learning engineers to implement reinforcement learning models.
- Collaborate across mechanical, electrical, and software teams to integrate control logic with sensing and actuation hardware.
- Help inform the mechanical and electrical design to maximize capability and flexibility.
- Create the control system architecture; determine the correct level of abstraction from actuators all the way up to whole-robot policy.
You might thrive in this role if you:
- Have a strong robotics background, including manipulators, mobile robots, or other complex physical systems.
- Have experience with actuation, control systems, robot dynamics, estimation, subsystem tuning, or whole-body motion.
- Are comfortable being hands-on with robotic hardware, including commissioning, debugging, testing, and iterating on real robots.
- Have strong fundamentals in classical control, system dynamics, and estimation, with exposure to modern learning-based or reinforcement learning approaches.
- Can move comfortably across the stack, from low-level actuator behavior and hardware interfaces to higher-level algorithms and whole-robot performance.
- Have experience writing performant production-quality software in C++ or Rust.
- Experience with robotic hardware and enjoy iterating quickly between simulation and real-world testing environments.
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About OpenAI
AI research and deploymentOpenAI conducts AI research and develops products and platforms for consumers, developers and businesses.
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