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Bedrock Ocean Exploration builds and operates autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that collect georeferenced ocean-floor data at commercial scale. The company delivers bathymetric and imagery data products to government and commercial customers, with missions mobilizing from any vessel in 24–72 hours and automated pipelines returning insights in hours rather than weeks.
The Staff Robotics Engineer sets technical direction for autonomy and vehicle software across the growing AUV fleet. This is a systems-level role that owns the architecture tying together onboard software, guidance/navigation/control (GNC), state estimation, sensing, and mission autonomy. The engineer operates above any single subsystem, making architectural decisions that keep vehicles reliable during long, continuous missions at sea.
Key responsibilities include: architecting modular vehicle software with clean, versioned interfaces across subsystems so they evolve independently; leading hard cross-disciplinary robotics problems end to end; setting standards for how the team builds, tests, and validates software; driving rigorous testing across simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, and field trials; improving autonomy behaviors for minimal-intervention long-duration missions; owning fault detection, isolation, and recovery (FDIR) and safe-state behaviors; designing for fleet-scale deployment with safe over-the-air updates and rollback; ensuring reliable onboard data capture and sensor synchronization; mentoring robotics engineers and fostering knowledge sharing; championing practical AI adoption in the robotics workflow; and documenting strategic architecture for autonomy and vehicle software.
The role requires 8+ years building robotics or autonomous-systems software, including 5–7 years in commercial, production robotics at scale, plus staff-level technical leadership. Candidates should have deep experience architecting vehicle or autonomy software that remained robust and modular as it grew, strong C++ and/or Python fundamentals, hands-on ROS or ROS 2 experience on real hardware, depth in GNC/state estimation/sensor fusion/mission autonomy, and a track record building FDIR and health-monitoring systems. The engineer will work across GNC, vehicle management, onboard comms, hardware, sensing, software, and field operations, spend time with real vehicles, and share in on-call rotation for live campaigns.
