Robotics Engineer

This job is posted for Lightspeed via Parallel

Robotics Integration / Controls Engineer (Full-Stack Capable)

Location: Onsite, Northbrook, IL (not remote) Start: Immediate Engagement: Contract or contract-to-hire; rate/duration based on experience Confidentiality: NDA required before any project specifics are shared

About the role

We're an early-stage venture building an automated physical system driven by robotic arms, live sensing, and a real-time software layer that ties the hardware to a customer-facing application and operator dashboard. We're past the idea stage and moving fast toward a working demo.

We need an engineer who can own the seam between the hardware and the software — bringing up robot arms and controls, wiring sensors, actuators, and telemetry into a real-time control plane, and writing the glue that lets the rest of the stack drive and observe the cell. We're open to candidates coming at this from either direction: a robotics integration engineer who has worked across the software stack, or a controls / automation engineer with strong real-time integration instincts ready to go deeper on robotics. This is not a front-end design role — visual polish lives with another hire.

This role is onsite in Northbrook, IL. It is not remote. Start is immediate.

What you'll do

• Bring up and integrate robot arms and the surrounding control system; design and tune motion, tooling, sequencing, and safety logic
• Integrate sensors, actuators, and I/O; build the real-time control/telemetry layer — stream motion and sensor data, model job/device state as explicit state machines, expose a clean API contract for the application and operator console to consume
• Stand up and maintain a simulation environment that mirrors the physical cell, so work can proceed in parallel with hardware and demos never block on a single robot
• Integrate vision/perception where the task requires it
• Write the supporting software around the robotics and controls — services, scripts, and APIs — and coordinate with the application team against a shared control-plane contract

Required skills

We expect a strong fit from either a robotics or a controls/automation background:

• Robotics or industrial controls experience — hands-on bring-up and integration of robot arms (cobots a plus) and/or automated cells, motion control, PLC/industrial automation, sensor and actuator integration, in a real, physical setting
• Real-time integration — comfortable with control loops, I/O, and streaming machine state; modeling device/job state and telemetry (WebSockets/SSE, pub/sub, fieldbus, or equivalent)
• Programming — Python and/or C++ for robotics and integration work; scripting comfort generally
• Enough full-stack ability to build the software around the hardware — APIs, services, a basic data layer (Node/TypeScript and Postgres in our stack, but we care more that you can work across it than that you've used our exact tools)
• Pragmatic, demo-driven, comfortable owning ambiguity in an early-stage build

Strongly preferred / differentiators

• ROS / ROS2 — building and debugging real nodes, topics, and control loops
• Simulation frameworks — Isaac Sim, Gazebo, MuJoCo, or similar; experience standing up a sim that meaningfully mirrors real hardware
• AI/ML in robotics — learned policies, imitation/RL, or forward-looking approaches (e.g. VLA-style models)
• Vision / perception — object detection, pose estimation, hand-eye calibration
• SLAM or other spatial/localization work, especially on mobile platforms
• Functional safety — e-stop logic, safety-rated I/O, risk assessment for automated equipment

Logistics

• Onsite, Northbrook, IL — required, no exceptions
• Immediate start
• NDA required before any project specifics are shared. This posting intentionally omits details about the product and company.
• Contract or contract-to-hire; rate/duration to be discussed based on experience