Senior Software Engineer, Controls

The Mission

GRAM is a self replication company creating populations of insectoids for the physical economy.

Our first research frontier is self‑preservation: the base case of physical self‑replication. Our machines will survive, coordinate, and recover without humans. We believe scalable machine labor requires more than single‑agent task generality or machines shaped in our image.

We are looking for a Software Controls Engineer, Locomotion with 5-7+ years of experience to own the locomotion stack for a first‑of‑its‑kind six‑legged Insectoid robot designed to climb and traverse complex steel infrastructure. You'll join a small, scrappy founding team building something that doesn't exist anywhere else. It is a hexapod that uses magnetic end effectors to climb high‑voltage towers, bridges, and pipelines for inspection and manipulation.

This is a ground‑floor opportunity where your contributions will directly shape the direction of the company. We need someone with real hardware deployment experience, a Mac Gyver mindset, and the grit to iterate rapidly in a test‑build‑break loop every single day.

You will own the Locomotion stack that makes this real on hardware. The near‑term benchmark is simple to state and hard to achieve: a multi‑legged robot should cover the usable structure of a complex steel lattice structure from a single placement, using learned policies, local contact intelligence, and perception‑conditioned foothold selection.

The technical shape is specific: redundant contact on a multi‑legged platform; learned contact schedules that generalize across substrate geometry; vision‑conditioned local foothold selection from raw geometry; and gravity‑agnostic stability across vertical, lateral, and inverted orientations.

• Getting the robot walking reliably and integrating magnetic adhesion for vertical/near‑vertical traversal on steel lattice structures
• Building perception‑conditioned path planning and foothold selection so the robot can navigate dozens of different lattice structure geometries
• Reviewing and rebuilding existing control software with proper software development practices, discarding what doesn't work and establishing solid foundations

• Bachelor's degree in robotics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Demonstrated ownership of architecture and technical direction for a deployed manipulation system spanning planning, sensing, control, monitoring, and recovery.
• Strong C++ and Python skills, including experience with a robotics framework such as ROS 2, Drake, Move It, Pinocchio, or an equivalent internal stack.
• Built and deployed a closed‑loop manipulation capability on a physical robot; you can explain its architecture and provide measured results from repeated trials.
• Led a failure‑driven redesign that separated planning, perception, control, and hardware causes and produced a correction that survived repeated physical test.

• Python
• Isaac Lab
• Mu Jo Co
• Mu Jo Co  MPC
• Drake
• Pinocchio
• OCS2
• Crocoddyl
• ROS2
• Reinforcement Learning
• Sim‑to‑Real Transfer

The annual base salary range for this Palo Alto position is $150,000-$250,000.

Health coverage, benefits, and generous equity come with the role.

This role is on‑site in Palo Alto.

A relocation bonus is available.

We hire to start as soon as possible. We review what you've shipped; if it's the caliber we seek, interviews take about a week, start to finish. We treat your work and conversations with discretion.