Member of Technical Staff, Controls Engineer

About IndustrialNext

We envision a world where no manual labor is required to build anything and everything we want.

A Safe world with abundant creativity.

We're building a rapidly scalable, high-performing robotic system for fully autonomous factories. We deliver across multiple embodiments — bimanual / single-arm stations, wheeled humanoids, and mobile manipulators — on a shared stack. Every task we ship has to hit ≥99% success at human or industrial-automation cycle time.

Physical AI is moving fast. Academia and research-focused startups have shown promising early results, but very few have shipped robots that work at industrial precision, speed, and reliability. We have, and that gap is our work.

We invite highly talented AI and robotics engineers excited to join a hyper-scaling startup. You'll work tirelessly to ship first products to early customers while building the foundation models and robots to reshape global manufacturing.

What we believe

• Real-world deployment beats paper benchmarks. Our bar is what runs at customer cycle time with high success rate and dexterity. Every shift, for months and years.
• Commercialized Data Flywheel is critical for Scalable Foundation Models. We're not waiting until our foundation model is ready. We build and deploy working robots, while also building a data pipeline to feed into our foundation model.
• Hardware iteration speed is a moat. Custom grippers, mobile platforms, and data rigs at production runs of dozens to hundreds. Moving fast from hardware design to deployment is what wins.

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Why this role mattersLow-level control is the substrate every other layer in our stack rests on — multiple coordinated systems (arm, mobile base, end-effector, dual-arm) under contact-rich loads at industrial cycle times. If learned policies are right but the controller can't track them, or if the vendor SDK integration is wrong, the system doesn't ship — you'll work across both sides with the controls and integration team.

What you'll do • Design low-level control across our wheeled-humanoid and mobile-manipulator platforms.

• Integrate vendor SDKs and tune compliance / impedance / force control for contact-rich tasks.
• Build the safety, interlock, and hardware-in-the-loop test layer.

Required • Education. BS in EE / MechE / Robotics / CS; MS or PhD a plus.

• Experience. 5+ years controls work shipped on real robots (industrial, mobile, or humanoid).
• Real-time control system design. Whole-body or coordinated multi-system control on real hardware. Comfortable across the stack from motor-level current control up to task-space trajectory tracking.
• Industrial arm SDK experience. Hands-on with at least one of Franka, Flexiv, Universal Robots, ABB, KUKA, or equivalent industrial arm. You've used and extended the vendor's control modes.
• Compliance / impedance / force control for contact-rich manipulation tasks; has tuned these on real hardware against real parts.
• Low-level integration. EtherCAT, motor drivers, encoder calibration, low-level firmware integration when the vendor stack ends. ROS2 control stack on top.

Strongly preferred • Whole-body control or coordinated multi-arm control on a real platform.

• Hardware-in-the-loop test rig design and automated controller-validation regression suites.
• Has worked alongside ML / IL teams to deploy learned policies through a control stack — understands what makes a policy "control-friendly".
• Teleoperation control-stack work (latency, force feedback, command shaping).
• Tactile / force-torque sensor integration.
• Industrial deployment experience — factory floor, line-side commissioning, customer-site debug.

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How we work

We are looking for hard, relentless engineers who treat shipping as the only metric.

• In-person, on the hardware. SF, on-site, full-time. Relocation will be supported.
• Insane work ethic. Startups win by fast speed, focused and relentless pushes.
• High ownership, high equity. Small team, meaningful equity. Your contribution is significant.
• Demanding and fast-paced. Tight timing constraints, customer commitments, little slack.

If you've thrived at SpaceX, Tesla, or other fast-moving startups, you'll recognize the energy. If "work-life balance" is your top filter, we are not the right fit.

What we offer

• Competitive base salary + meaningful equity in an early-stage, fast-growing company.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Relocation support to SF Bay Area.
• A team you'll learn from every day, working on problems that haven't been solved yet.

Equal opportunity We are an equal opportunity employer. We hire on merit and welcome candidates from any background.