Principle Robotics Software Engineer (Physical AI) - MA, Wilmington, United States
$200,000 - $275,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 6 October 2026 by the employer.
Advance robotics with human-level dexterity using tactile sensing, vision, robot learning, and control.
About the role
This role involves leading software architecture across robot systems and infrastructure for developing, testing, and deploying Physical AI.
What you'll do
- Own manipulation use cases from definition through demonstration, defining capabilities and measurable success criteria.
- Turn ambiguous R&D goals into executable plans, identifying unknowns and making technical trade-offs.
- Lead delivery across engineers with varied experience, breaking milestones into scoped work with clear ownership.
- Design, implement, and review core software in C++ and Python, evolving the ROS 2-based stack and integrating hardware.
- Establish production-grade engineering practices for research software, including automated tests, continuous integration, and hardware-in-the-loop validation.
- Partner with AI and other software engineers to design data collection, replay, simulation, training, evaluation workflows, and deployment tooling.
What you'll need
- 8+ years developing software for robotics, autonomous systems, or embedded systems, including integration with physical hardware.
- Track record of delivering substantial software or systems from design into production, including integration, testing, debugging, maintenance, and reliability improvements.
- Strong C++ and Python skills, sound software architecture judgment, and hands-on experience with ROS 2 or comparable robotics middleware.
- Working knowledge of robot control, including feedback, timing constraints, actuator limits, and safe integration of learned policies with lower-level controllers.
- Working understanding of Physical AI infrastructure across data collection, simulation, training, evaluation, and deployment, with hands-on experience in part of that workflow.
- Experience owning use cases: translating application needs into capabilities and success criteria, leading implementation and validation.
- Experience leading technical delivery without reporting-line authority, including scoping work, coordinating dependencies, and mentoring engineers.
- Sound judgment in ambiguous R&D settings: validate assumptions, make decisions with incomplete information, and balance learning speed, maintainability, and delivery commitments.
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, robotics, electrical or mechanical engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Nice to have
- Robot manipulation, teleoperation, or integration of tactile, vision, and force sensing.
- Familiarity with robotic simulation tools such as Isaac Sim or MuJoCo.
- Deployment and evaluation of learned robot policies, including reinforcement learning, imitation learning, or vision-language-action models.
- ML data pipelines, GPU or distributed compute infrastructure, or edge inference.
- Controller design, such as impedance/force control or model-predictive control; real-time or embedded systems development.
- Interest in developing people-management skills over time.
Skills: robotics, tactile sensing, robot learning, Physical AI, ROS 2
This role has been open 9 days — well below the 81-day median for AI/ML Hardware Engineering roles.
AI/ML Hardware Engineering · AI ML Hardware
|
Open roles in category
506
|
Median days open
81 d
|
Median salary
$235k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Analog Devices | All employers we track in this specialty (506 roles · 76 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 19 | 506 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 111 | 6156 · 145 employers |
| Median days open | 34 d | 81 d (−47 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $235k |
Skills observed across this category: robotics, tactile sensing, robot learning, Physical AI, ROS 2
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 102 open roles · median 107 d
- NVIDIA · 90 open roles · median 51 d
- AMD · 41 open roles · median 79 d
- Micron Technology · 27 open roles · median 66 d
- Analog Devices (this employer) · 19 open roles · median 34 d
- Mobileye · 17 open roles · median 78 d
How we counted: 506 open AI/ML Hardware Engineering (AI ML Hardware) roles from 76 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 16 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.