Robotics Engineer Jobs in San Francisco, CA

About the Team

Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives.

About the Role
We’re looking for a Robotics Control Systems Engineer to take on a foundational role within our robotics team. You’ll help architect, implement, tune, and verify the control infrastructure that enables intelligent, reliable, and responsive robot behavior.

This is a deeply hands-on role focused on real-time systemsance. You’ll spend significant time working directly with robots onsite: debugging behavior, tuning subsystems, running experiments, and providing feedback across mechanical, electrical, and software teams.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person 5 days a week.

In this role, you will:

• Design and implement real-time control algorithms for robotic systems, including motion control, feedback loops, state estimation, actuator control, and subsystem tuning.

• Define the control architecture from low-level actuators and hardware interfaces through whole-robot behavior and policy.

• Identify and characterize actuator, hardware, and software parameters through rigorous experimentation, testing, commissioning, and verification.

• Work with machine learning engineers to implement reinforcement learning models.

• Collaborate across mechanical, electrical, and software teams to integrate control logic with sensing and actuation hardware.

• Help inform the mechanical and electrical design to maximize capability and flexibility.

• Create the control system architecture; determine the correct level of abstraction from actuators all the way up to whole-robot policy.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have a strong robotics background, including manipulators, mobile robots, or other complex physical systems.

• Have experience with actuation, control systems, robot dynamics, estimation, subsystem tuning, or whole-body motion.

• Are comfortable being hands-on with robotic hardware, including commissioning, debugging, testing, and iterating on real robots.

• Have strong fundamentals in classical control, system dynamics, and estimation, with exposure to modern learning-based or reinforcement learning approaches.

• Can move comfortably across the stackance.

• Have experience writing performant production-quality software in C++ or Rust.

• Experience with robotic hardware and enjoy iterating quickly between simulation and real-world testing environments.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employeration, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable lawation technology systems and related data security obligations.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

Compensation

$380K – $460K + Offers Equity