Robotics Navigation & Control Engineer — Perception
Atlanta, Georgia · On-site preferred (hybrid considered for exceptional candidates) · Up to $225,000 · No visa sponsorship (US Citizens / Green Card holders only)
The company
An early-stage robotics company building autonomous systems for freight logistics. Their robots load and unload trailers in live customer facilities today — this isn't a research project, it's a shipped product.
The role
You'll own both sides of the autonomy stack: perception (LiDAR, cameras, IMUs, sensor fusion) and navigation & control (path planning, motion controllers, localisation). Your work goes straight onto production robots operating alongside people and heavy cargo.
What you'll be doing
- Designing and maintaining the perception pipeline — object detection, segmentation, localisation, mapping
- Building path planning and motion control (PID, MPC, LQR)
- Integrating and calibrating LiDAR, depth cameras, and IMUs on production platforms
- Developing point cloud processing, filtering, clustering, and registration for SLAM
- Building sensor fusion using EKF / particle filters for accurate state estimation
- Creating and maintaining datasets for model training, validation, and regression testing
- Debugging perception and control failures on deployed robots using logs and on-site investigation
- Working closely with hardware and controls teams to keep outputs aligned with downstream requirements
What you'll need
- 5+ years building perception or navigation systems for physical robots at a robotics or AV company
- Strong C++ and Python
- Deep LiDAR processing experience — filtering, clustering, registration, SLAM
- Camera-based perception experience
- Production ROS or ROS2 experience
- Sensor calibration experience — intrinsic, extrinsic, multi-sensor
- Familiarity with PyTorch or TensorFlow for perception tasks
- A track record shipping software to real robots in real environments — not simulation only
- Strong hardware debugging skills
No formal education minimum. Shipped, production experience matters more than academic background here.
Nice to have
- Gazebo or similar physics simulation experience
- ROS migration experience
- AWS IoT / Greengrass or similar edge-cloud experience
- Background in logistics, warehousing, or freight