The Role
As Team Lead for Navigation & Planning, you will lead the team responsible for how our humanoids understand where they are, where they need to go, and how to get there safely. You will own the navigation and planning stack end-to-end, from localization and mapping through motion and footstep planning to higher-level task and behavior planning, working with perception, controls, ML, and product to turn capability targets into robots that move purposefully in the real world.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will set direction for the team while staying close to the code, making the hard tradeoffs that define autonomous behavior: classical methods versus learned policies, plan optimality versus reactivity, on-robot compute versus cloud inference, safety guarantees versus exploration. You will grow up a small team of strong engineers, set the technical bar for the subsystem, and be accountable for what the robot can navigate, plan, and accomplish in the field.
Responsibilities and Duties
- Lead the navigation and planning team, setting technical direction across localization, mapping, motion planning, footstep planning, and high-level task and behavior planning, and growing the team through hiring, mentoring, and clear engineering standards.
- Own the architecture of the navigation and planning stack, including SLAM and state estimation, occupancy and semantic maps, global and local planners, footstep and whole-body motion planning, and the interfaces to perception and controls.
- Drive components from research and prototype through productionization, deployment, and on-robot operation, balancing capability, latency, safety, and reliability.
- Define and execute evaluation pipelines that measure success rate, robustness, recovery behavior, and safety in simulation and on real robots in the environments we serve.
- Partner deeply with perception, controls, ML, and hardware to co-design the system boundaries where state estimation, planning, and execution meet.
- Make principled decisions about when to use classical methods, optimization-based approaches, and learned policies, and how to combine them in a robust hybrid stack.
- Set the technical bar for the team through design reviews, code review standards, and a culture that values rigor, speed, and learning from real-world deployments.
- Be accountable for the capability outcomes of navigation and planning, including how reliably the robot can localize, plan, and act in unstructured outdoor and public environments.
Qualifications and Skills
- Strong fundamentals in robotics navigation and planning, including state estimation, SLAM, motion planning, trajectory optimization, and search and graph-based planning.
- Proven track record shipping autonomous navigation or planning systems onto physical robots operating in real-world environments, whether ground, aerial, legged, or humanoid.
- Demonstrated technical leadership: you have led or mentored engineers, owned multi-person efforts, and set direction for a subsystem or team.
- Strong software engineering skills in modern C++ and Python, with the ability to write production-quality real-time code and to set the bar for the team''s codebase.
- Systems judgment to choose between classical, optimization-based, and learned approaches, and to reason clearly about latency, compute, safety, and reliability tradeoffs.
- Experience designing evaluation pipelines that distinguish real progress from cherry-picked demos, in both simulation and on hardware.
- A bias toward shipping, measured by capabilities delivered on real robots rather than papers or benchmarks alone.
- Excellent collaboration skills across perception, controls, ML, and product, with the ability to communicate clearly to both technical and executive audiences.
Bonus Qualifications
- Direct experience with legged or humanoid robots, including footstep planning, whole-body motion planning, or contact-aware planning.
- Experience with learning-based planning, behavior policies, or foundation-model-driven task planning.
- Familiarity with operating robots in unstructured outdoor or public environments, including handling dynamic obstacles, crowds, and adverse conditions.
- Background with ROS or comparable robotics middleware at production scale.
- History of taking a navigation or planning subsystem from prototype to deployed product.
Compensation
- Base salary range: $TBD, commensurate with experience, level, and location.
- Meaningful early-stage equity in a well-capitalized humanoid robotics company.
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents.
- 401(k) plan.
- Paid time off, parental leave, and company holidays.
- Commuter benefits, a fully equipped lab, and workspace.
Location
- This role is based on-site at our headquarters in the Bay Area with occasional travel to Japan. Close collaboration with hardware, controls, and product teams in the lab is core to the work, so this is not a remote position.
Work Authorization
- Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States at the time of application.
- We are able to sponsor work visas for exceptional candidates who are permitted by law.
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