Robotics Engineer

About the role

ROLE OVERVIEW The Robotics Engineer will build and maintain the robotics platforms, software stack and simulation infrastructure necessary for delivering the company’s research into the physical world. Working closely with the science and engineering teams, they will turn research ideas into working systems on real hardware. They should combine strong software engineering with hands-on hardware experience and enjoy the challenge of making intelligent agents operate reliably outside the lab. Role scope will be calibrated to the experience and profile of the candidate KEY RESPONSIBILITIES Research - Design, build and maintain robotic platforms (e.g., manipulators and mobile robots), including sensor integration, calibration and actuator control. - Develop and maintain the robotics software stack, including perception, state estimation, motion planning and control. - Build simulation environments and sim-to-real pipelines for training and evaluating agents. - Deploy and optimize learned models (policies, vision, language and action models) on robot hardware, with attention to latency, safety and reliability. - Develop data collection infrastructure, including teleoperation and logging, to generate high-quality datasets for research. Collaboration - Work with research scientists and ML engineers to turn research ideas into demonstrators. - Establish testing, safety and lab practices for operating robots alongside people. - Contribute to a rigorous and supportive engineering culture, sharing knowledge with colleagues. REQUIREMENTS Essential - Degree in robotics, mechatronics, electrical engineering, computer science or related field. - Strong software engineering skills in C/C++ and Python, including code for real-time systems. - Hands-on experience building, integrating and debugging robotic systems on real hardware, using ROS or ROS 2. - Solid grounding in core robotics including kinematics, dynamics, control, motion planning and perception. - Experience with robotics simulators such as Isaac Sim, MuJoCo or Gazebo. Preferred - Master’s or PhD in robotics or related field. - Experience deploying machine learning on robots, e.g., imitation learning, reinforcement learning or vision-language-action models. - Experience with teleoperation systems, robot learning data pipelines or sim-to-real transfer. - Familiarity with embedded systems and edge GPU compute (e.g., NVIDIA Jetson). __________________________ WHY JOIN METACOGNITION? You’ll work alongside leading researchers, engineers and thinkers to build intelligent systems capable of learning, remembering and reasoning over time. We're an early stage startup with ambitious goals. Joining us will give you a genuine opportunity to shape both our technology and the company we become. WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT - Competitive remuneration - Remote working - The opportunity to work with leading researchers, engineers and industry experts - A highly collaborative, fast-moving environment - Meaningful ownership and the opportunity to influence how we build and grow - Opportunities to learn, experiment and work on genuinely challenging problems Metacognition is committed to creating an inclusive workplace where different perspectives, experiences and backgrounds are valued. We encourage applications from people with diverse backgrounds and experiences. INTERESTED? If you’re excited by ambitious problems, intelligent systems and the opportunity to build something from the ground up, we’d love to hear from you.