Senior Robotics Engineer, Controls

About the Role Join a small engineering team developing autonomous directed-energy systems in the defense sector. As a senior individual contributor, you will own the precision motion control stack, helping deliver reliable pointing and tracking performance on real hardware. What You'll Do Architect and tune precision pointing and tracking control loops, including closed-loop sensor-to-actuator control at hundreds of hertz. Develop state estimation and sensor fusion using IMU, encoder, and vision feedback. Identify and model gimbal, mount, and actuator dynamics, then compensate for resonance, friction, backlash, and saturation. Build simulation and hardware-in-the-loop infrastructure to develop and validate controls. Characterize system performance on hardware and in field tests, and document controls standards and tuning practices. What We're Looking For At least 4 years of robotics experience, including hands-on design and tuning of closed-loop controllers on motion hardware. Strong grounding in classical and state-space controls, including LQR and MPC, plus practical state estimation using Kalman-family or complementary filters. Experience with system identification, frequency-domain tuning, structural resonance compensation, and closing the simulation-to-hardware gap. Modern C++ for real-time control, and Python or MATLAB/Simulink for modeling and analysis. Direct experience with servo drives, brushless motors, encoders, and IMUs, as well as real-time latency and jitter constraints. Comfort working across mechanical, electrical, and software engineering; gimbal, precision-pointing, tracking, or defense systems experience is relevant. Compensation & Benefits Base salary: $180,000 to $200,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available. Location On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.