Senior Staff Engineer Jobs in Waltham, MA

The Systems Engineering, Integration, and Test (SEIT) Department of Boston Dynamics (BD) seeks a highly talented Senior Staff Systems Engineer who is passionate about working with an exceptional team of roboticists to develop the world’s most capable, safe, and reliable humanoid robot. This Systems Engineer will focus primarily on facilitating delivery of customer-driven software systems, potentially including environmental perception, mapping, motion planning, control systems, robot application software, systems software, robot behavior learning, data operations, enterprise software integration, and Human Robot Interaction.

You will help develop and promote the Systems Engineering (SE) approach that spans requirements generation, architectural trade studies, performance attribute engineering, system analysis, simulation, design, integration, and testing. You will be innovating not only on product implementation of advanced robotic technologies, but you will also be helping with new approaches to the emergent SE discipline at Boston Dynamics.

How you will make an impact:

• Solicit requirements from stakeholders and subject-matter experts. Derive system and software requirements from stakeholder requirements. Perform research, analysis, and experimentation to ensure requirements are properly parameterized. Author and seek approval for high quality system requirements.

• Help develop, document, and build agreement to a compatible set of functional performance expectations, including User eXperience, robot taskability, behavioral reliability, and safety. Facilitate activities that accelerate product design convergence to these targets.

• Participate in development and documentation of the functional architecture of the product ecosystem.

• Facilitate improvements in the software requirements-to-verification traceability pipeline across heterogeneous tools. Partner with SQA teams to sustain a requirement-driven automated verification framework.

• Play a leadership role in authoring the humanoid product’s evolving Concept of Operations, ensuring that the intended breadth of use cases are clearly defined for the product.

• Support development of quantified product usage scenarios and their effective usage in requirement verification activities.

• Support system DFMEA execution. Support system trade studies and program technical reviews.

• Develop and maintain system interface control documents.

• Review requirements from other authors, providing coaching to achieve requirement quality expectations. Facilitate requirement approval and change management.

• Ensure requirements are well organized within the appropriate databases, traced to design documents, verification plans, verification results, and potentially other entities of interest.

• Track and report on requirements development and verification progress, identify holes, mitigate risks, and help drive issue closure.

Required Skills & Experience:

• Exceptional written & verbal communication, interpersonal skills, collaboration, and conflict resolution.

• 5+ years of experience systems engineering of complex embedded mechatronic systems, or cyber-physical systems.

• Experience working intimately with specialized requirements management tools. Expertise in Jama is especially helpful.

• BS in engineering (Robotics, Computers, Software, Electrical, Systems, or similar). MS in engineering preferred.

Desired Skills & Experience:

• Autonomous vehicles, mobile robotics, perception technologies, and walking robots.

• Experience developing complex embedded systems for mass production.

• Authoring, reviewing, and approving a wide variety of requirements.

• Reliability & robustness engineering methodologies, including boundary and parameter diagramming, DFMEA, DVP&R, root cause analysis, statistical methods.

• Safety-critical system development.

• Helpful to have familiarity with software across the robot's hardware subsystems, including: electric actuation (motor controllers, encoders), sensing and perception (stereo cameras, depth sensors, inertial sensing, tactile sensors), on-board compute (AI accelerators, microcontrollers), real-time networking (ethernet, Wi-Fi), power systems (battery management, charging), and human-robot interaction hardware (user interfaces, 2-way audio, status indicators/LEDs, wireless radios).

• Software tools including Jama, Jira, Google Workspace, Testrails, and Matlab.

• Software development experience in a highly collaborative, multi-team environment, including fluency with Git version control and Linux.

• Familiarity with one or more programming languages (e.g. C++, python)

• Systems software design, architecture, development life cycle and processes.

• Familiarity with modern Machine Learning best practices, architectures, and workflows.

• Familiarity with cybersecurity concepts and best practices.

• Experience working in cross-functional teams, spanning algorithms, software, and hardware architectures.

• Troubleshooting/debugging issues between hardware and software.

We are interested in all qualified candidates eligible to work in the United States. However, we are not able to sponsor visas for this position.

The base pay range for this position is between $150,000 to $190,000 annually. Base pay will depend on multiple individualized factors including, but not limited to internal equity, job related knowledge, skills and experience. This range represents a good faith estimate of compensation at the time of posting. Boston Dynamics offers a generous Benefits package including medical, dental vision, 401(k), paid time off and an annual bonus structure. Additional details regarding these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer for employment.

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