Senior Autonomy Engineer, Task Planning

Senior Autonomy Engineer, Task Planning (Agentic AI)Chicago, IL - On siteUp to $200k + equityVisa sponsorship and relocation support

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The companyA well funded construction robotics company building AI powered robots that manufacture wall, floor and roof panels and work on live building sites. Their mission is tackling the housing crisis by making homebuilding faster, more precise and more affordable. Robots are already deployed and doing real work.
The roleYou’ll own how the robots decide what to do next. A planning layer already exists; your job is to make it scalable, production ready and able to work across both robot product lines.Every robot action comes down to two primitives: move or actuate. You’ll build the planner that reasons over a goal, sequences those primitives, picks classical control or a learned policy for each step, and recovers when something goes wrong. The aim is simple: a robot finishes a whole panel or room on its own.
This is the first of three principal level hires (alongside Robot Learning and World Sensing), so you’ll be shaping the foundation the rest of the autonomy stack is built on.
What you’ll doDefine the primitive library and the contract between planner and executorBuild the task graph from BIM models: what’s in front of the robot and what depends on whatBuild a two layer planner: a reasoning layer (LLM / reasoning models) for open ended decisions, plus solvers for reach, collision and trajectoryDecide where reasoning models help and where they don’t, and keep them off the real time control pathBuild execution monitoring and recovery: verify, retry, switch approach, flag or escalate to a personLog every decision with its reasoning so any outcome can be explainedDesign for two robots sharing one task (one holds, one fastens)Set autonomy architecture, mentor engineers, and still write production code and test on real robots every week
What you’ll bring5+ years building autonomy, task planning or decision making systems for robots or AVs, deployed in productionHands on manipulation experience with real hardware, ideally end effectors in unstructured environmentsTask level planning: behavior trees, TAMP, HTN or similarExecution monitoring and fault recovery on a deployed systemHands on with LLMs or reasoning models in a robot decision loopStrong Python and C++, ROS2, Linux, Docker, CI/CDReal ownership: you built it, not xzbcwsv just contributed to it. Startup or small team experience is a big plusExperience setting technical direction and mentoring senior engineers
Nice to haveMS or PhD in Robotics, CS or AINavigation as well as manipulationMoveIt, OMPL or trajectory optimisationMulti robot coordination or fleet orchestrationFunctional safety or formal verificationCAD / BIM experience, or a background in construction, manufacturing or industrial automation
What’s on offerBase salary up to $200kEquityComprehensive benefitsVisa sponsorship and relocation supportDirect access to robots, sensors and manufacturing environments every weekA rare problem: agentic planning on physical robots, in messy real world sites