Lead Robotics Engineer

We're automating homebuilding. Construction is one of the least automated industries in the world, and homes are still built largely by hand, in slow, expensive and fragmented processes. AUAR is a physical AI and robotics company changing that.

Our software platform, Master Builder, turns a building design into the instructions needed to manufacture a home's timber structure. Our robotic Micro Factory then deploys directly onto a home builder's site and produces the wall, floor and roof panels they need, on demand. It arrives in a shipping container, sits on a footprint of max 30 by 30 ft and runs off generators on a gravel pad: no grid connection, no permanent site works.

We own and run the equipment, our customers buy the panels it produces, not the machine.

We're past pure R&D and shipping our first commercial Micro Factories this year, across the UK, Europe and North America. Backed by Planet A, PT1, Shadow Ventures and ABB Robotics, we're a team of around 35 engineers, roboticists, operators and designers working from an 11,000 sq ft R&D and demonstration facility in London. The systems we build now will decide how homes are manufactured at scale.

We're looking for a Lead Robotics Engineer to take technical and delivery leadership of the robotics systems that run our Micro Factories.

This is a hands-on engineering leadership role, with robotics software as your technical home. From day one you'll work directly in our ROS 2 stack: developing features, reviewing architecture and PRs, debugging on real hardware and unblocking other engineers. We expect meaningful technical input from week one, and contributions to the codebase within your first month. The Micro Factory spans ROS 2, behaviour-tree orchestration, industrial robots, PLC-controlled mechanisms, sensors, tooling, vision and simulation, running against timber that bends, twists and varies.

Your deepest expertise will be in robotics software, but you'll need to think at the level of the complete machine.

Beyond your own output, you'll own how the team turns product goals into technical plans and delivers against them: capabilities, dependencies, capacity, critical path, fast decisions. You'll lead a team spanning robotics software, simulation and system integration, including senior engineers with deep expertise of their own, so you'll need to know when to go deep, when to delegate and when the right engineering decision is to simplify.

We're looking for an experienced robotics engineer who can lead, not a manager with only a high-level understanding of the domain.

• The robotics software stack - Shape and evolve the ROS 2 and behaviour-tree architecture that coordinates robots, mechanisms, tooling, sensors and production processes.
• Technical delivery - Turn product objectives into credible engineering plans with clear scope, ownership, sequencing, dependencies, capacity and milestones.
• Engineering throughput - Understand where work is accumulating, identify the real constraint and move capacity accordingly, so that adding engineers actually increases system-level delivery velocity.
• Engineering judgement - Make fast decisions about architecture, scope and complexity. Know when to build the robust solution, when to simplify, when to defer, and when a temporary mitigation is the right way to keep delivery moving.
• Team effectiveness - Review designs and PRs, unblock engineers, raise the standard of the codebase, mentor the team, and create the technical structure that lets senior and junior engineers work in parallel.
• Robotics in the real world - Build software that works against real hardware and real materials: timber that bends and varies, machines that must recover gracefully, systems that have to run…