Senior Robotics Controls Engineer

Company: Atoms
Location: San Francisco CA (in office 5 days per week; up to 15% travel to mining sites)
Compensation: $170000 - $220000 competitive equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: Visa transfers and new sponsorship (H-1B TN)

Atoms is building the machines that power the next era of progress. Founded by Travis Kalanick after Uber it consolidates eight years of technology development to bring Physical AI to industries that move civilization forward across Atoms Food (formerly CloudKitchens) Atoms Mining (formerly Pronto AI with 100 autonomous haul trucks in live operation hauling millions of tons) and Atoms Transport.

Atoms takes a modular OEM-agnostic approach integrating autonomy into existing vehicles and equipment and has raised $1.25B.

Atoms is hiring Robotics Controls Engineers (3 years) to design and tune the core control systems that let 200 ton autonomous haul trucks operate safely at mining sites. You will work on localization path following longitudinal and lateral control and steering solving hard navigation problems at remote unstructured sites in an engineering-first culture that ships real production systems.

• Design implement and tune control algorithms (MPC PID) across varying payloads and grades.
• Develop state estimation and localization pipelines fusing GPS/RTK IMU and other sensors including handling GPS dropouts.
• Analyze performance through field testing on real trucks and log replay and debug control issues to root cause.
• Integrate controls with perception planning and hardware teams in production vehicles.
• Travel periodically (up to 15%) to customer mining sites for deployment and tuning.

• 3 years of controls engineering on autonomous vehicles or robots
• Control algorithm design (MPC PID) and state estimation (Kalman filters)
• Strong Python and C with ROS and Linux
• Field testing and debugging experience on real hardware
• Ability to work in the San Francisco office 5 days a week and travel up to 15%

• Mining autonomy experience (for example Hexagon Caterpillar or Komatsu)
• Heavy vehicle or off-road autonomy

Python C ROS Linux MPC NumPy SciPy NVIDIA Jetson GPS/RTK IMU CAN bus Kalman filters (EKF/UKF)

REVENUE: 14.5% of first-year salary. Est. fee per hire $25K-$32K; 8 seat(s) up to $226K if all filled.

TARGET COMPANIES (client (Hexagon/Caterpillar/Komatsu named) suggested): Hexagon Caterpillar Komatsu Aurora Kodiak Built Robotics.

BEST-FIT CANDIDATE: 3 yrs; AV/robot controls (MPC/PID); state estimation; field testing; visa: transfers new H-1B/TN; location: SF 5 days 15% travel.