Robotics Engineer
Robotics engineers in this role own the full stack of physical robot systems—from mechanical design and actuator integration through perception, control algorithms, and autonomous navigation. They spend their days building and debugging real hardware, implementing motion planning and state estimation, integrating sensors, and closing the simulation-to-reality gap through iterative testing and validation. What sets this role apart is the hands-on responsibility for end-to-end system performance: these engineers don't just write algorithms, they physically integrate them onto platforms, troubleshoot discrepancies between simulation and real behavior, and iterate rapidly in response to field testing. Robotics engineers typically sit within dedicated platform or autonomy teams at AI robotics companies—alongside firmware engineers, mechanical engineers, and autonomy software teams—working on systems like humanoid robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, industrial manipulators, or mobile platforms where perception and control directly impact real-world task execution.
Measured across 28 of 29 open postings.
This role is advertised at one level, so a single figure for the role would describe none of them. Experience and pay are the midpoints for each level on its own.
| Level | Share | Median years | Median pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mid | 61%(17) | — | — |
A dash means too few postings stated it to report a midpoint at any level. Most companies do not publish a salary band, so pay is indicative rather than a market rate. 4 levels with fewer than 10 open postings are not shown.
“Work with machine learning engineers to implement reinforcement learning models”
“Apply machine learning to improve how the controller adapts across vehicles and operating conditions”
“Prior experience applying Machine Learning (ML) techniques to motion priors, trajectory smoothing, or learned state estimation/calibration”
“Deep expertise with JAX, TensorFlow, or PyTorch”
Skills
What companies are looking for in this role.
Hardware and embedded systems
Hardware bring-up and debug
ML systems development
Distributed systems architecture
Backend and API engineering
Simulation and physical modeling
Hardware test and validation
Research-to-production translation
Research experiment design
Systems performance optimization
Technical issue diagnosis
Robotics systems engineering
Computer vision and perception
Embodied AI and sim-to-real
Agent system architecture and development
Agent workflow design
Technology
The tools and technologies that define this role.
Open Jobs
29 open Robotics Engineer jobs across 12 companies.
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