Founding Motion Planning Engineer

Company background

We are a low-cost, swarm robotics company for industry and defense. We see a world of ubiquitous low-cost robots transforming almost all aspects of society, but we see an urgent need in the defense industry. We focus on building swarms of robots that incorporate a low-cost BOM, an autonomous stack optimized for off the shelf components, and a global planner that enables swarm capabilities for groups of robots to accomplish sophisticated tasks.

Our first product is a defense application building Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), collectively termed - Attritable, Networked, Tactical Swarm (ANTS). Each UGV in ANTS is an independently-tasked, attritable robot designed for on-demand and autonomous mobility. When operating as a swarm, ANTS is capable of executing more advanced and coordinated, high-level capabilities across a battlespace. ANTS will help solve some of the DoD’s biggest problems that will save lives and increase defense capabilities.

The Founders and have decades of experience in self-driving cars and trucks, humanoids, and UAVs with experience from NASA, JPL, Cruise, Embark, McKinsey, Amazon, and the CIA.

Position description

We are looking for a talented Motion Planning Engineer to lead Motion Planning for our ground swarm robots. This position will be responsible for creating planning modules to provide traversable, kinematically-feasible trajectories for off road terrain that includes static and dynamic obstacles. You’ll be leveraging the outputs of a perception system to determine environmental costs to use in the planning system you develop and the planning modules created will need to achieve real time timing and performance targets. Additionally, this position will have the added challenge of needing to design modules for a swarm of ground robots, not just one! This engineer will work closely with company leadership to align autonomous navigation capabilities with the product roadmap.

Required qualifications

• Experience developing new Motion Planning solutions for autonomous vehicles or other mobile robots
• Fluency in search algorithms, vehicle dynamics, and writing high-performance C++ code
• 2+ years of experience building production software using modern software practices
• A BS in computer science or applied mathematics with coursework, research, or work experience in planning
• Experience working with large datasets and processing pipelines
• Comfort working in the high-paced, fluid environment of a tech startup
• Excitement about contributing to the defense of the United States and its allies
• Ability to obtain and hold a U.S. security clearance

Preferred qualifications

• A MS or PhD in computer science or applied mathematics with coursework or research experience in planning
• Real-world experience fielding planning systems on autonomous ground vehicles operating in difficult, unstructured environments, such as DARPA RACER or other DoD applications.
• Experience with robotics/sensor simulation
• Ability to relocate to Phoenix, AZ area