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Tutor Intelligence is building general-purpose, intelligent robots for deployment in factories, logistics, and eventually homes. The company operates at the intersection of research and real-world deployment, with every line of code directly impacting physical operations.
You will own the safety-critical control systems for robotic arms operating in customer facilities alongside people. This role spans both low-level controls engineering and software architecture. Responsibilities include:
- Owning safety-critical control code: joint limits, speed limits, stopping distances and times, contact and collision behavior, and the feedback loop that converts motion commands into torque.
- Developing and maintaining the control loop itself: timing, stability, and failure-mode handling from motion command through drive actuation.
- Architecting code for trustworthiness: keeping safety-critical sections small, isolated, thoroughly tested, and reviewable; establishing governance for how other code interacts with safety systems.
- Building hardware-in-the-loop test infrastructure: a physical test bench and continuous-integration pipeline that validates control code against real arms and real safety hardware.
- Maintaining safety evidence: stopping-time measurements and test suites that support the safety argument, updated as code and hardware evolve.
- Documenting design decisions, limits, and rationale for other engineers to follow.
- Engaging with formal safety processes: risk assessments and standards compliance (the company will provide training).
The role requires comfort with the physics of robotics—dynamics, torque, inertia, stopping distances, contact behavior—and the ability to reason about what hardware will do under various conditions.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Real-time control experience on physical systems (robot arms, vehicles, aircraft, or similar); you have written control code that moved hardware and handled failures.
- Experience in a mission-critical codebase where mistakes had physical consequences; you have written and organized substantial code and understand what structure, testing, and review that demands.
- Strong grasp of physics: dynamics, torque, inertia, stopping distances, contact.
- Strong systems software skills: C++ and Python or equivalent; real-time behavior on Linux; ability to isolate safety-critical code from the rest.
- Experience building or using hardware-in-the-loop test rigs.
NICE TO HAVE:
- Familiarity with robot or machinery safety standards (ISO 10218, ISO 13849, ANSI/RIA R15.06).
- EtherCAT or other fieldbus experience with servo drives.
- Experience with safety-rated controllers or certified functional safety components.
- Background in warehouses, manufacturing, or environments where robots and people share space.
