Robotics Controls Engineer

About the Role General Astronautics is building autonomous dexterous robotic arms for orbital inspection, repair, and assembly. Our systems will enable spacecraft to perform complex operations without astronaut intervention, transforming how hardware is maintained, upgraded, and operated in space. We're looking for a Founding Robotics Engineer to own the software, controls, and autonomy stack that enables our robotic arms to perform complex manipulation tasks in microgravity. This role spans motion planning, controls, perception, simulation, and integration with physical hardware, with opportunities to develop and deploy emerging learning-based approaches to robotic autonomy. This is a high-ownership, high-accountability role. You will be one of the first engineers at the company, working directly on the robot's core capabilities from initial development through flight demonstrations. The software you build will control real hardware in space.

Responsibilities

• Lead development of the robotics software and autonomy stack for dexterous manipulation in microgravity

• Develop and implement motion planning, trajectory generation, inverse kinematics, and feedback control algorithms for robotic manipulators

• Integrate perception, sensing, and state estimation to enable autonomous interaction with objects and spacecraft hardware

• Develop, train, evaluate, and deploy learning-based robotic policies for autonomous manipulation tasks

• Define performance metrics, test procedures, and verification plans for autonomous robotic operations

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Robotics, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or related discipline.

• Strong understanding of robotic kinematics, dynamics, motion planning, and control theory

• Proficiency in C++ and/or Python for robotics software development

• Experience developing and deploying software on physical robotic systems

• Strong debugging, problem-solving, and systems integration skills

• Demonstrated ability to take ownership of complex technical problems from concept through working implementation

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Experience with ROS 2

• Experience with robotic perception, computer vision, pose estimation, and sensor fusion

• Familiarity with vision-language-action models, foundation models for robotics, or world models

• Experience with physics simulation environments such as Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, or equivalent

• Experience deploying robotic software on embedded GPU platforms, including NVIDIA Jetson

• Experience developing autonomous systems for aerospace, defense, or other safety-critical environments

• Familiarity with software verification, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and configuration management

ITAR / Citizenship Requirements

• Must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, or eligible for authorization under U.S. export regulations.