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Robotics Autonomy Engineer, Planning & Control

FieldAI· Engineering – Autonomy
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Irvine, CA$100k - $230kFull-timePosted 3mo ago

About the role

Robotics Autonomy Engineer focusing on planning, navigation, and control for Field AI’s autonomous robotic systems across wheeled, legged, and humanoid platforms. Role centers on designing and deploying path planning, trajectory optimization, obstacle avoidance, and motion control algorithms for real-world, field deployments with an on-site Irvine, CA location.

Responsibilities

  • Design, develop, and refine path planning and navigation algorithms for challenging real-world scenarios such as narrow passages, dynamic obstacles, and off-road or unstructured environments.
  • Develop optimization based trajectory planning that ensures smooth, reliable, and efficient navigation across wheeled, legged, and humanoid platforms.
  • Build real time obstacle avoidance and reactive planning layers that keep robots safe among people, machines, and changing terrain.
  • Develop and tune control algorithms for precise trajectory tracking and stable operation across different robotic systems.
  • Plan and track within the constraints set by our independent safety layer, and work with the safety team to keep nominal behavior well inside the safe envelope.
  • Develop learning based planning and navigation, from learned navigation policies to foundation model driven mobility.
  • Collaborate across autonomy layers for seamless coordination between perception, planning, and control.
  • Build and maintain testing pipelines from unit-level validation to full robot deployment, using simulation for evaluation, benchmarking, and regression validation.
  • Analyze real-world telemetry to diagnose field issues and deliver targeted improvements while maintaining general-case reliability.

Qualifications

  • Master’s degree or higher in Robotics, Computer Science, Mechanical/Electrical Engineering, or a related field (PhD a plus)
  • Strong understanding of motion planning, trajectory generation, and control systems.
  • Experience in classical planning and control, such as path planning, trajectory optimization, and model predictive control (MPC)
  • Experience implementing learning based navigation, such as learned navigation policies or vision language action models (VLA) for mobility
  • Experience developing algorithms for one or more robotic systems (wheeled, legged, wheeled-legged, humanoid)
  • Solid programming skills in C++ and Python on Linux-based systems
  • Familiarity with robotics middleware such as ROS/ROS 2
  • Experience with robot sensors including LiDARs, stereo/depth cameras, IMUs, GPS, and wheel encoders

Skills

Required:Path planningTrajectory optimizationObstacle avoidanceControl systemsROS/ROS 2
Nice to have:Machine learning for navigation

Benefits

  • Part of our compensation package also includes full benefits, equity, and generous time.
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About FieldAI

Robot intelligence built for the real-world.

FieldAI is the leader in deploying general-purpose robots in unstructured environments, providing a universal brain that works across many robots, and many tasks.

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