Robot Platform Engineer (human)

Job summary

NEURA Robotics is seeking a Robot Platform Engineer to integrate robot abstraction layers, manage middleware wiring, and implement operational state machines for various robot platforms. The role involves developing and maintaining robot control APIs, ensuring robust fault management, and conducting end-to-end integration testing in both simulation and on real hardware.

Qualifications

• Strong C++ skills, including modern features (C++17 or later), real-time-safe patterns, and allocation discipline.
• Experience in state machine design for complex robotic systems, including clean separation of states, transition guards, and fault handling.
• Familiarity with hierarchical state machine patterns (e.g., Boost.SML, sc::statechart, BehaviorTree.CPP).
• Experience with gRPC and protobuf, including API server implementation, streaming RPCs, and backward-compatible proto evolution.
• Prior production experience with robot abstraction layers, such as ros2_control hardware interfaces, MoveIt2 hardware interface authoring, OROCOS RTT components, Apex.OS deployment, vendor SDKs (e.g., Franka Control Interface, Universal Robots URX, KUKA Sunrise.OS, ABB EGM), or proprietary in-house layers.
• Experience bringing up a real robot platform end-to-end, including hardware integration intuition, timing assumptions, sensor calibration discipline, and fault scenario design.

Responsibilities

• Integrate robot abstraction layer code, mapping hardware capabilities to the shared platform API.
• Wire middleware for the platform, including ROS 2 launch graph, ros2_control YAML, DDS QoS, OROCOS RTT component pipelines, or Apex.OS.
• Implement operational state machine (BOOT, HOMING, OPERATIONAL, FAULT, E-STOP, RECOVERY) with transition guards, entry/exit actions, and timeout handling.
• Manage mode switching, including active controller selection, transition guards, safe mode entry/exit, and gravity-compensation-only mode.
• Orchestrate power-on/off sequences, boot sequencing, drive enable/disable, homing procedures, and controlled shutdown.
• Develop watchdog and fault management, including fault classification, recovery action selection, and E-stop escalation.
• Implement robot-level health monitoring, aggregating diagnostics, joint state health, drive temperature, joint limit proximity, and communication latency.
• Implement gRPC server for mode commands, state queries, fault acknowledgment, streaming joint state, operational state, and diagnostics.
• Co-own proto messages for the robot control API with the Platform Architect and Robot Client SDK Engineer.
• Develop and maintain platform integration test suite with end-to-end CI test coverage in simulation (MuJoCo / Isaac Sim) and on real hardware.

Skills

Relocation