Staff Controls Software Engineer in London

Location: London

About the Company

My client is a fast-growing, well-funded technology company operating at the forefront of AI, robotics and advanced engineering. Its mission is to develop highly sophisticated technology that brings AI out of the digital world and into real-world industrial environments. The business is entering an important stage of its growth and is building a world-class international team of engineers, researchers and technology specialists to develop the next generation of advanced robotic systems.

About the Role

My client is hiring a Staff Controls Software Engineer to join its Controls team based in London. We are seeking an experienced Staff Controls Software Engineer to lead the development, integration, and maintenance of production-grade control software for advanced robotic systems. This role sits at the intersection of controls and software engineering – focused on turning advanced control strategies into robust, maintainable, and validated production systems. You’ll be responsible for ensuring that the control stack powering the company's robotic systems is deterministic, safe, tested, and deployable at scale. You bring both deep robotics control experience (10+ years in robotic system development) and strong software engineering discipline – designing architectures that perform reliably in real-time environments.

What You'll Do

• Design and maintain modular, real-time control architectures supporting locomotion, manipulation, and teleoperation.
• Implement high-performance control loops and middleware interfaces for deterministic, safe operation.
• Industrialise algorithms, ensuring production readiness, maintainability, and performance.
• Establish clear software boundaries and interfaces between motion planning, control, and hardware layers.
• Translate research prototypes into scalable, maintainable, and testable control software.
• Apply modern software development practices including CI/CD, code reviews, testing frameworks, and documentation.
• Define reliability, latency, and safety metrics and enforce them throughout the control stack.
• Lead the integration of real-time control software on embedded or Linux-based systems, ensuring consistent behaviour across hardware targets.
• Develop automated testing frameworks including simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, regression, and performance testing.
• Drive release and version management of the control stack, ensuring stability across branches and deployments.
• Conduct profiling, benchmarking, and performance validation on robotic hardware.
• Define release protocols to ensure reproducibility and verifiable system behaviour.
• Implement software-based fail-safes, watchdogs, and redundancy mechanisms for safety-critical control paths.
• Work closely with hardware and safety teams to ensure fault detection, graceful degradation, and safe state transitions.
• Lead by example through hands-on coding, code reviews, and system-level debugging.
• Mentor engineers on control software best practices, testing methodologies, and performance optimisation.
• Contribute to the long-term control software roadmap, guiding architecture evolution and quality standards.

What We're Looking For

• B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Robotics, Control, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years of experience developing robotics control software for real-time systems.
• Proven expertise in C++ (modern standards) and Python for software implementation, testing, and automation.
• Strong background in control theory, robot kinematics & dynamics, and real-time control systems.
• Experience deploying and validating control software both in simulation and on physical robotic platforms.
• Solid understanding of software architecture, version control (Git), CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing.
• Excellent debugging, profiling, and system performance optimisation skills.
• Track record of shipping production-quality robotics software, not simply research prototypes.
• Proven experience managing the software lifecycle, including release management and cross-team integration.

Nice to Have

• Experience with ROS2, real-time Linux, or RTOS environments.
• Familiarity with relevant tools and libraries such as Eigen, Pinocchio, Placo, PyTorch and MuJoCo.
• Familiarity with safety-critical systems, redundancy, and failover mechanisms.
• Background in whole-body control, actuator coordination, or real-time trajectory execution.
• Experience in Joint/Cartesian Impedance and force control.
• Strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to influence architecture decisions and engineering culture.
• Experience in learning-based control methods such as reinforcement learning (RL) or imitation learning.

What We Offer

• Meaningful time off to rest and recharge: 23 days of annual leave (accrued), 15 days of paid sick leave, and paid company holidays.
• Fully funded private healthcare for UK employees, with broad provider access, virtual and in-person care, and strong mental health and serious illness support.
• Equity included – we believe builders should share in what they build.
• Pension scheme with a total 8% contribution (5% employee, 3% employer) on full earnings.
• Free daily breakfast, catered lunch, and snacks in-office.
• Collaboration with top-tier engineers, researchers, and product experts in AI and robotics.
• Freedom to influence the product and own key initiatives.

Interested?

This is an opportunity to take a senior, hands-on engineering role within an ambitious advanced technology business, working on some of the most challenging problems at the intersection of robotics, real-time control and production-grade software engineering. If you have extensive robotics controls experience, strong C++ and Python skills, and – crucially – a track record of taking control software beyond research and into reliable, production-quality robotic systems, we'd like to hear from you. Apply now for a confidential discussion about the role and the company behind it.