Title: Senior Robotics / Embodied Systems Engineer Level: Senior
Purpose Own embodied integration for manipulation, contact-rich testing, and real-robot adversarial experiments. Lead or co-lead research directions emerging from physical-AI vulnerability scanning.
Mission Our aim is to build the world’s first holistic vulnerability scanner for physical AI systems. The scanner will evaluate embodied AI systems under controlled perturbations across sensing, language-conditioned control, contact dynamics, and real-robot execution. You will be among the first technical owners of this project: identifying high-impact research directions, leading real-robot experiments, and building the manipulator-based infrastructure required for embodied physical-AI vulnerability scanning.
What you will own
- Manipulator bring-up and stable operation
- Real-vs-sim embodiment integration for contact-rich tasks
- Safe execution infrastructure for manipulator experiments
- Force/torque, gripper, and optional tactile/wrist sensing integration
- Recovery logic and invalid-behavior criteria at the robot level
- Identification of research gaps from real-robot failures and conversion of findings into research directions
- Repeatable experimental infrastructure for embodied adversarial testing
Responsibilities
- Integrate and maintain the manipulator stack in ROS 2
- Own controller interfaces, motion-planning integration, and hardware reliability
- Build contact-rich experimental tasks such as insertion, grasping, slip, force-aware interaction, and recovery
- Integrate force/torque sensing and optional tactile or wrist sensing into the scanner
- Define safe operating envelopes, shutdown procedures, fallback behaviours, and intervention criteria
- Build reproducible real/sim manipulation scenarios
- Lead hardware-in-the-loop adversarial experiments on embodied systems
- Create tooling that makes robot experiments repeatable, measurable, and safe
- Diagnose failures across perception, planning, control, sensing, and contact dynamics
- Reformulate observed robotic failures into researchable problems, evaluation protocols, technical reports, publications, patents, or prototype capabilities
Required background
- Demonstrated senior-level research or innovation record, evidenced by peer-reviewed publications, meaningful patents, major contributions to recognised robotics/AI systems, open-source robotics infrastructure, or deployed advanced robotic systems
- Led at least one full-cycle research or advanced R&D project from problem formulation through implementation, experimental validation, and tangible outcome
- Strong hands-on experience with real robots in research, advanced prototyping, or production-like experimental settings
- Deep ROS 2 experience, including hardware integration and debugging
- Experience with robot control, motion planning, and safety boundaries
- Experience integrating force/torque sensing and ideally tactile, wrist, or gripper sensing
- Comfort with contact-rich tasks, recovery behaviours, and failure diagnosis
- Strong Python and C++ skills
- Demonstrated ownership of messy real-world robotic systems, not just model development
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