Robotics Software Engineer Full-time

Robotics Software Engineer

The Center for Human and Robot Co-Adaptation (HRC) brings together six universities: The University of Texas at Austin, Indiana University Bloomington, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, University of Utah, and Yale University. Together, we study how people and robots can, do, and might adapt to one another over months and years as needs, skills, expectations, and social contexts change. The Center unites researchers across robotics, AI, cognitive science, social science, data, and ethics to establish a new science of human-robot co-adaptation. This science will be developed, tested, and refined through the Human Environment with Robots (HERO) Facility Network: long-term deployments of assistive robots in real-world settings including student dorms, cafés, museums, homes, hospitals, and assisted-living facilities.

The Center is supported by a five-year, $30 million award from the National Science Foundation through its Science and Technology Centers (STC) program.

The Center Robotics Software Engineer will develop, integrate, maintain, and deploy the common robotics software infrastructure that supports HERO deployments and foundational Center research.

The successful candidate will be a strong software engineer with experience building and debugging complex robotic systems. They will work across research and engineering teams to translate rapidly evolving research software into robust deployable systems, while maintaining the testing, configuration, monitoring, and deployment infrastructure needed for long-running real-world robot operation. The engineer will be expected to take ownership of the Center's shared robotics software infrastructure, establish sound software engineering practices, and develop safeguards that allow new capabilities to be integrated without compromising the reliability of ongoing HERO deployments. The Robotics Software Engineer will work closely with the Robotics Hardware Engineer to coordinate platform integration, deployment readiness, troubleshooting, and upgrades across the Center's robotic systems.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related technical field.
• Two or more years of relevant professional or research software engineering experience involving robotic, autonomous, distributed, or similarly complex systems.
• Strong programming proficiency in C++ and Python or comparable languages used in robotics systems.
• Proficiency with Linux-based systems and experience diagnosing operating-system, process, dependency, networking, and software-interface problems.
• Experience developing software with ROS 2 or comparable robotic middleware.
• Demonstrated ability to design, integrate, test, and debug complex software systems spanning multiple processes and components.
• Experience with modern software engineering practices including version control, code review, automated testing, build systems, and software documentation.
• Strong critical-thinking, debugging, and root-cause-analysis skills.
• Strong written, verbal, and interpersonal communication skills and the ability to work effectively with researchers and engineers across multiple teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience developing and deploying software for mobile robots, mobile manipulators, or other autonomous systems operating in real-world environments.
• Deep experience with ROS 2, including nodes, topics, services, actions, parameters, launch systems, lifecycle management, TF, timing, logging, and distributed robotic systems.
• Experience architecting reusable robotics software across multiple robot platforms or hardware configurations.
• Experience with continuous integration and deployment, automated testing, simulation-based testing, and hardware-in-the-loop testing for robotic systems.
• Experience with Docker or other containers, systemd, shell scripting, networking tools, build systems, package management, and automated system configuration.
• Experience with robotic simulation or digital-twin environments such as Gazebo, Isaac Sim, or comparable systems.
• Experience developing monitoring, logging, observability, watchdog, fault-detection, and automated recovery infrastructure for long-running autonomous systems.
• Experience integrating machine-learning, computer-vision, large pretrained models, or other computationally intensive AI systems into real-time robotic applications.
• Experience integrating robotic systems with remote, cloud, cluster, or high-performance computing resources.
• Experience with robot data collection, synchronization, recording, replay, and management of large multimodal datasets.
• Experience managing software releases, configurations, compatibility, and deployment across a fleet of robotic systems or multiple operational sites.
• Demonstrated ability to take ownership of an unfamiliar robotics software system, understand its architecture, diagnose failures, improve its reliability, and evolve it while maintaining operational continuity.

Salary Range

$120,000 + depending on qualifications

Working Conditions

• Typical office environment.

Required Materials

• Resume/CV
• 3 work references with their contact information; at least one reference should be from a supervisor
• Letter of interest