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Salary: USD 255,000 - 322,000 / annual
Atoms is building Physical AI—real-world robots for industries including food, mining, and transport. The company integrates hardware, software, AI, operations, and manufacturing to deploy autonomous systems into real environments at scale.
As Robotics Lead, you will provide technical leadership across the autonomy stack, defining architecture and technical direction for systems that turn perception, prediction, and planning into safe, reliable autonomous vehicle behavior. This is a hands-on technical leadership role requiring deep understanding of how complex autonomous systems integrate end-to-end.
Key responsibilities:
- Define and drive technical direction of the robotics and autonomy stack
- Lead architecture and integration across perception, localization, prediction, planning, controls, and vehicle systems
- Develop and improve algorithms for motion planning, trajectory generation, decision-making, and vehicle control
- Own complex system-level problems spanning multiple autonomy stack components
- Diagnose real-world autonomy failures and drive improvements across algorithms, software, sensors, and vehicle systems
- Establish evaluation and validation methodologies connecting component-level performance to vehicle behavior
- Partner with AI Research and Perception teams to integrate learned models into the broader autonomy system
- Work closely with software, hardware, firmware, simulation, and vehicle engineering teams to bring autonomous capabilities into production
- Provide technical mentorship and raise the engineering bar across the robotics organization
The role is based in San Francisco with five-day-per-week onsite work.
Requirements:
- Significant experience developing robotics, autonomous vehicles, or other complex autonomous systems
- Deep technical expertise in one or more of: motion planning and trajectory generation, prediction and decision-making, localization and state estimation, controls, robotics systems architecture, or autonomous vehicle systems
- Strong understanding of how perception, planning, localization, controls, and vehicle systems interact within a production autonomy stack
- Strong programming skills in C++ and/or Python
- Experience designing and debugging complex real-time robotic systems
- Demonstrated ability to lead major technical initiatives and make architecture-level decisions
- Experience taking robotics or autonomy capabilities from development through real-world deployment
- Strong communication skills and ability to work across highly specialized engineering teams
Preferred qualifications:
- Experience building production autonomous vehicle systems
- Experience with real-time, safety-critical, or highly reliable robotic systems
- Knowledge of vehicle dynamics, sensor systems, and embedded or onboard compute
- Experience with simulation, closed-loop evaluation, and autonomous-system validation
- Experience integrating machine learning models into robotics or autonomy systems
- Experience diagnosing long-tail failures using vehicle logs, simulation, and real-world testing
- Experience mentoring senior engineers or providing technical leadership across multiple teams
