Generalist logo

Software Engineer: Robotics Controls

Generalist

Somerville, MAFull-time$200–350K/yrPosted 1 day agoStill listed today

Most applications go out cold — see where you stand first. No sign-up to start.

You apply on the employer's site, with no Olive account needed.

Watch jobs like this.

Don't just apply. Show up ready.

Olive works from this exact posting.

At a glance

Compensation
$200–350K/yr
Location
Somerville, MA
Schedule
Full-time
Work Authorization
Not specified

Olive lists jobs from US employers, including remote roles you can work from the United States.

Job overview

The Software Engineer: Robotics Controls will own software that controls Generalist’s robots, collaborating with machine learning teams to translate output intentions into smooth, efficient, safe, and responsive actions across robot embodiments. The role also works with hardware teams and partners to optimize system behavior, dynamics, and components, and spans real-time control from low-level firmware to embodiment-specific input specifications.

Skills & qualifications

RequiredNice to have

Skills

Rigid Body KinematicsRobotic ControlsProduction RoboticsPythonC++Kinematics and Simulation LibrariesROS/ROS2/ZCM

Qualifications

5+ Years ExperiencePhD

Full job description

About Generalist At Generalist, we are on a mission to build general intelligence for the physical world and make it useful to everyone. We believe the industries and homes of the future will depend on humans and machines working together in new ways. Robots can help us build more and get more done. We build embodied foundation models, starting with a focus on dexterity. This requires advancing the frontiers of data, models, and hardware, to enable robots to intelligently interact with the physical world. The company embraces both large-scale AI and robotics as core to its DNA. Our team of researchers, roboticists, and company builders come from OpenAI, Boston Dynamics, Google DeepMind, and other frontier labs—with a track record of shipping AI breakthroughs. Before Generalist, we pioneered large embodied multimodal models and vision-language-action models (PaLM-E, RT-2, Gemini Robotics), launched and scaled ChatGPT and GPT-4 to hundreds of millions of users, engineered the foundations of autonomous driving, built next-generation robots (Atlas, Spot, Stretch) and pushed the limits of what they can do (from parkour to manipulation, and testing robustness). We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. About the Role You will own the software that controls our robots. You will collaborate with ML to turn output intentions into smooth, efficient, safe, and responsive actions on a variety of robot embodiments. You will collaborate with hardware and partners to ensure the system, dynamics, and components are behaving optimally.

You’ll be responsible for:

  • Designing, implementing, and testing the entire real-time control system from the low-level firmware to the input spec for each embodiment we have

  • Ownership over a wide variety of robot embodiments from stock industrial co-bot arms to custom hardware

You might thrive in this role if you:

  • Have extensive experience in rigid body kinematics, and robotic controls

  • Have experience bringing robots into production environments with stringent reliability requirements

  • Are experienced in high performance, production-ready Python and C++

  • Experience with kinematics/simulation libraries

  • Have experience in robotic middleware platforms such as ROS/ROS2/ZCM

  • Successful candidates have extensive experience (5+ years), often including a PhD

How this job compares

Set against the 42,008 open Software Engineer jobs on Olive Jobs, counted November 6, 2026.

Pay
  • This posting$200–350K/yr
  • Massachusetts median$140–210K/yr991 salary ranges
  • US median$135–218K/yr33,367 salary ranges

This range's midpoint, $275K, is 60% above the Massachusetts median midpoint ($172K) — in the top quarter of Software Engineer salary ranges in Massachusetts.

Openings
Olive Jobs lists 1,162 open Software Engineer jobs in Massachusetts and 42,008 across the US. 8% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
Hiring the most in Massachusetts
Experience
Software Engineer postings that state a minimum ask for 5 years of experience at the median; the middle half ask for 3 to 7 years (34,212 postings).
Education
13,955 of the 42,008 open Software Engineer jobs (33%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.

Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on November 6, 2026. Pay medians are the middle values of the low ends and of the high ends of postings that list both ends of a range in the same cadence (a yearly salary or an hourly rate); a range's midpoint is halfway between its ends. Pay and experience figures resting on fewer than 20 postings are left out.

Prepare for this role

You've read the whole posting — now see how you match it.