Software Engineer: Robotics Controls
Somerville, MAFull-time$200–350K/yrPosted 1 day agoStill listed today
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At a glance
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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
Skills
Qualifications
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:
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Designing, implementing, and testing the entire real-time control system from the low-level firmware to the input spec for each embodiment we have
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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:
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Have extensive experience in rigid body kinematics, and robotic controls
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Have experience bringing robots into production environments with stringent reliability requirements
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Are experienced in high performance, production-ready Python and C++
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Experience with kinematics/simulation libraries
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Have experience in robotic middleware platforms such as ROS/ROS2/ZCM
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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.
- 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.
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