Senior System Engineer Robotics

Your mission

Our robots don't ship with a robotics team standing next to them in the warehouse. They ship with NODE.OS, and NODE.OS is yours to own.
Robotics Core pushes the algorithmic boundary in navigation, localization and planning. Frontier turns robot state into interfaces people actually trust. You sit between them and turn what they build into a robot that shows up for its shift, does its job, and doesn't page anyone at 3am. Not a hardware role: no motor drivers, no sourcing LiDAR units. Everything above that is yours, from the driver layer to a fleet of dozens moving through our Master Control System (VDA5050-compliant).
You're not maintaining one module. You're accountable for how our robots perform in the field.
What you'll do

• Sit between Robotics Core and Frontier: Their output becomes something operable, field reality becomes requirements they can act on. What's worth building and what's worth working around is your call.
• Own the driver-to-behavior stack: Hardware abstraction, ROS 2 DISTRO Jazzy driver layer, state machines. Where the line falls between a hardware quirk you abstract away and a behavior bug you fix properly is your decision, and every later feature inherits it.
• Design and guard the safety-relevant logic on the robot: Every rule trades throughput against certainty, and you own the trade-off, not just the code that implements it.
• Own robot-to-fleet communication: VDA5050 up to the Master Control System, plus the coordination and traffic-management logic that has to hold up on a real warehouse floor. The algorithms often come from Robotics Core, but when integration turns up gaps you dig into them instead of just wiring them up.
• Run the Master Control System as a production service: Cloud Deployed using Docker. Observability using OpenTelemetry, Orchestration open. You define what counts as a healthy fleet, and what triggers an alert versus a shrug.
• Own deployment and SRE for robot and fleet software: Every rollout strategy, rollback plan and monitoring threshold is a bet on how much operator trust you'll risk for speed.
• Debug production incidents on live customer fleets: Whether you call something a root cause or a symptom decides whether the same failure shows up again next week.

Your profile

Must-have

• 7+ yrs building and operating software for AMRs, or comparable safety-relevant real-time distributed systems
• ROS 2 or comparable, and you can reason about driver layers, state machines and behavior architectures
• C++ and/or Python, at a level where you know when correctness beats shipping speed
• Safety concepts in robotics or industrial systems: you design for the failure case, not the happy path
• Production distributed systems: pipelines, monitoring, incident response, rollback. You've been on-call for something that mattered
• You've owned a technical decision others disagreed with, and can still defend the trade-off
• You've carried something into production and stayed with it afterwards, including the part where it broke
• You question a requirement before you build it, without making the person who wrote it defensive

• VDA5050 or other fleet-management standards
• Multi-robot coordination or traffic management
• Intralogistics, warehouse automation, industrial deployments
• Observability tooling, chaos and fault-injection thinking

• you're early career or coming straight out of studies. No hard feelings, we just don't have the ramp-up capacity for this scope.

What we offer

• Your rhythm matters most, which is why we don't do such a thing as core hours
• Hybrid
• Deutschland-Ticket, subsidised
• Urban Sports Club
• Learning budget a year, spend it on whatever moves you
• Corporate Benefits for exclusive discounts
• and of course plenty of snacks and drinks in the office