Lead Engineer, Robot Behavior and Decision-Making

About the role

Andromeda Robotics builds the social intelligence layer for humanoid robots, with its first robot, Abi, already used in aged care and healthcare. The company is now scaling to a platform for thousands of environments and is looking for a founding member of its Mission Autonomy team. This team owns the robot's long-duration decision-making layer, which decides what Abi should do next, balances task-level trade-offs and adapts the plan across an eight-hour shift, sitting above layers for conversation, navigation, obstacle avoidance, perception, gestures and operator tooling.

Key responsibilities

• Propose and build the Mission Autonomy architecture from the ground up, using frontier models and evaluation in simulation and the real world, and work with the voice agent, mobile autonomy and gestures teams to design execution harnesses.
• Design the system: decide whether it is an agent harness ingesting scene graphs and acting over typed action primitives, or uses World Models and VLA components, and shape the roadmap.
• Prototype a working autonomy loop in simulation early, co-design simulation capabilities with the simulation engineer, and turn design conversations into contracts for other teams.
• Shape the action primitives, specify them, get them built, and design how Abi behaves when audio, perception, connectivity, navigation or platform health degrades.
• Establish deployment patterns from simulation prototypes to demonstrations on the robot, with observability, test gates and rollback mechanisms.
• Build an evaluation system with benchmarking protocols, evaluation methods and reporting for long-horizon missions.
• First 90 days: learn Abi in the real world, deliver the first architecture and a six-month build plan, then build a working simulation slice and take it to the lab.

Required profile

• 5+ years building autonomous systems, with an MS or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Previous autonomy experience (e.g., self-driving, mobile or field robotics) including at least one deployment lifecycle.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python, C++ or Rust, and practical robotics experience with hardware, sensors and actuators.
• Strong communication and influence skills, especially across teams that do not own your systems.
• Bonus: experience with mission autonomy systems, simulation-based evaluation, robot planning architectures (PDDL, behavior trees, finite-state machines) and research applying LLMs to long-duration task planning.

Required skills

• ROS 2, Nav2
• Simulation tools such as Isaac Sim, Gazebo or MuJoCo
• Safety-critical design principles for robots around people

What we offer

• Expected base salary of $200,000 to $240,000 USD, with flexibility for exceptional candidates.