Member of Technical Staff, Controls Engineer
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LocationSan Francisco, CA (On-site)
Work modeon-site
Typefull-time
DepartmentEngineering
EquityIncluded
Company size7+ people
First seenOct 4, 2026 · 1mo ago
Verified live19h ago
<p><strong>About IndustrialNext</strong></p><p><br></p><p>We envision a world where no manual labor is required to build anything and everything we want.</p><p><br></p><p>A Safe world with abundant creativity.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>We’re building a rapidly scalable, high-performing robotic system for fully autonomous factories. </strong>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.</p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>What we believe</strong></p><ol><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li></ol><p><br></p><p><span>_______________________________________________________</span></p><p><br></p>Why this role matters<p>Low-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.</p><p><br></p>What you’ll do<ul><li>Design low-level control across our wheeled-humanoid and mobile-manipulator platforms.</li><li>Integrate vendor SDKs and tune compliance / impedance / force control for contact-rich tasks.</li><li>Build the safety, interlock, and hardware-in-the-loop test layer.</li></ul><p><br></p>Required<ul><li><strong>Education.</strong> BS in EE / MechE / Robotics / CS; MS or PhD a plus.</li><li><strong>Experience.</strong> 5+ years controls work shipped on real robots (industrial, mobile, or humanoid).</li><li><strong>Real-time control system design.</strong> 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.</li><li><strong>Industrial arm SDK experience.</strong> 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.</li><li><strong>Compliance / impedance / force control</strong> for contact-rich manipulation tasks; has tuned these on real hardware against real parts.</li><li><strong>Low-level integration.</strong> EtherCAT, motor drivers, encoder calibration, low-level firmware integration when the vendor stack ends. ROS2 control stack on top.</li></ul><p><br></p>Strongly preferred<ul><li>Whole-body control or coordinated multi-arm control on a real platform.</li><li>Hardware-in-the-loop test rig design and automated controller-validation regression suites.</li><li>Has worked alongside ML / IL teams to deploy learned policies through a control stack — understands what makes a policy “control-friendly”.</li><li>Teleoperation control-stack work (latency, force feedback, command shaping).</li><li>Tactile / force-torque sensor integration.</li><li>Industrial deployment experience — factory floor, line-side commissioning, customer-site debug.</li></ul><p><br></p><p><br></p><p>_______________________________________________________</p><p><br></p><p><strong>How we work</strong></p><p><br></p><p>We are looking for hard, relentless engineers who treat shipping as the only metric.</p><ul><li>In-person, on the hardware. SF, on-site, full-time. Relocation will be supported.</li><li>Insane work ethic. Startups win by fast speed, focused and relentless pushes.</li><li>High ownership, high equity. Small team, meaningful equity. Your contribution is significant.</li><li>Demanding and fast-paced. Tight timing constraints, customer commitments, little slack.</li></ul><p><br></p><p><strong><em>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.</em></strong></p><p><br></p><p><strong>What we offer</strong></p><ul><li>Competitive base salary + meaningful equity in an early-stage, fast-growing company.</li><li>Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.</li><li>Relocation support to SF Bay Area.</li><li>A team you’ll learn from every day, working on problems that haven’t been solved yet.</li></ul><p><br></p><p><strong>Equal opportunity</strong></p><p>We are an equal opportunity employer. We hire on merit and welcome candidates from any background.</p><p><br></p>