Robotic Manipulation & Control Engineer

What the role actually is

Path Robotics is hiring a manipulation and control algorithms engineer in Columbus. The role owns the closed loop from sensing to motion for industrial robot arms and end effectors, including state estimation, predictive control, and trajectory correction on real hardware.

This is a technical research-engineering role, but it fits the board because the work is directly about robot manipulation behavior: how a production robot senses, moves, handles uncertainty, and fails safely.

• Build real-time control and state-estimation systems for sensor-guided manipulation
• Design feedback and predictive control loops that correct end-effector motion under uncertainty
• Set technical direction for learning-based and whole-body control work
• Reason about how perception errors affect motion accuracy
• Ship hard-real-time robotics software that runs reliably on physical systems

• Deep experience with real-time control, state estimation, and robotic manipulation
• Familiarity with model-predictive control, Kalman or particle filters, observability, or moving-horizon estimation
• Hands-on background with arm kinematics, dynamics, trajectory generation, and calibration
• Experience with sensor-guided motion, visual servoing, or closed perception-to-control loops
• Strong production C++, ROS or ROS 2, and real-time systems discipline

Industrial manipulation is where elegant robotics ideas meet unforgiving tolerances. Path's role is interesting because it is not just model work; it asks someone to make sensing, control, calibration, and real hardware behavior line up inside a production welding system.