Autonomy Engineer

Overview

Autonomy Engineer role on Nextpower's Robotics and Autonomy team, building and deploying robotic systems that operate at scale in real solar environments, with a focus on advancing navigation-stack performance across perception, planning, and control.

What you'll do

• Develop and improve autonomy capabilities across perception, planning, and control
• Get systems working on real robots, not just in simulation
• Debug and resolve issues observed in real-world operation
• Build and use simulation, log replay, and data pipelines to accelerate iteration
• Collaborate across hardware, integration, and test teams to ensure system-level performance

What you'll need

• Bachelor's degree in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field, or equivalent relevant professional experience
• 5+ years of experience in robotics, autonomy, or related fields, with demonstrated experience developing software for robotic or autonomous systems in real-world environments (not just simulation)
• Strong proficiency in at least one of: C, C++, Python, or Rust
• Strong experience with Linux command-line environments, Git, and Docker
• Strong experience with ROS2-based systems
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to debug complex system behavior
• Strong hands-on experience working with physical robotic systems
• Coachable and able to operate effectively within a fast-moving, collaborative team

Nice to have

• Developing and deploying perception systems such as terrain classification, object detection, recognition, and tracking, and semantic understanding of environments
• Model training, evaluation, deployment, and inference optimization on constrained embedded systems (e.g., CUDA, TensorRT, ONNX Runtime)
• Designing and implementing robot control and planning systems, including low-level path control (e.g., Model Predictive Control (MPC)) and path planning algorithms such as A*, Dijkstra's algorithm, or similar
• Multi-robot planning or coordination
• Sensor fusion, filtering, localization, and/or state estimation algorithms, such as Kalman Filters, Extended Kalman Filters (EKF), and graph-based optimization methods
• Characterizing sensor and motion noise
• Working with simulation tools such as Gazebo or similar
• Using log replay, data pipelines, and performance visualization to debug and improve systems
• Applying CI/CD, release processes, and test-driven development in robotics systems
• Debugging networking, remote systems, or communication stacks in deployed environments
• Operating and deploying systems in outdoor, field robotics environments, including working under compute, bandwidth, and latency constraints

Details

• Location: California, Remote, USA
• Works directly on robots in the field and in test environments
• Annual salary range: 160K to 190K (pay based on market location and may vary with experience, skills, education and other job-related reasons)