Senior Research Engineer, Planning and Behavior

As a Senior Research Engineer, Planning and Behavior, you will lead the design and deployment of the systems that determine how our robots move, decide, and safely interact in dynamic, human-centered environments. You’ll architect production-ready motion planning and behavioral decision-making frameworks that balance safety, reliability, efficiency, and real-world constraints. Working cross-functionally across perception, localization, controls, and hardware, you’ll deliver robust end-to-end autonomy that performs not just in simulation, but in the field. This is a hands-on, high-impact role where your work will directly shape how Cobot’s robots behave in the real world and scale across growing fleets.

Join us to reimagine the future of human-robot interaction.

Collaborative Robotics is a team of innovators and builders redefining the future of human-robot interaction. We are working to realize a world where robots are a trusted extension of your surroundings. They work, adapt, and react around you. Not the other way around.

This role is located at our Santa Clara, CA headquarters. Cobot will offer a relocation stipend if you are relocating to join our Santa Clara office and currently live more than 50 miles outside of the office location.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect and deploy robust motion planning and behavior systems for production robotic platforms.

• Develop real-time trajectory generation and optimization algorithms that meet strict safety, latency, and reliability constraints.

• Design and maintain behavior frameworks for task execution, reactive decision-making, and failure handling.

• Integrate planning modules with perception, localization, and control systems to deliver cohesive end-to-end autonomy.

• Identify, analyze, and resolve edge cases observed in field deployments; drive continuous improvement based on real-world data.

• Establish validation, testing, and benchmarking processes for autonomy performance, safety, and robustness.

• Contribute to system-level architecture decisions to ensure scalability across fleets and evolving product lines.

• Mentor engineers and help raise the bar for production-quality autonomy software.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.

• 5+ years of experience working within engineering teams.

• Proficiency in C++ and Python, with a readiness to learn new languages or technologies.

• Deep expertise in motion planning and behavior algorithms (e.g., sampling-based planning, trajectory optimization, model predictive control, decision trees, behavior trees, reinforcement learning, POMDPs).

• Experience implementing production-grade, high-reliability software on a robot or similar autonomous system.

• Highly motivated teammate with excellent oral and written communication skills.

• Enjoy working in a fast paced, collaborative and dynamic start-up environment as part of a small team.

• Willing to occasionally travel.

• Must have and maintain US work authorization.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Advanced degree (Master’s or PhD) in Computer Science, Robotics, or a related technical field.

• Robust background in robotics.

• Background in human-aware planning, shared autonomy, or collaborative robotics.

• Experience with ROS, writing GPU/hardware accelerated algorithms.

• Experience building scalable planning architectures across fleets of robots.

• Experience with simulation tools (Gazebo, CARLA, Isaac Sim, or Unit