Senior Software Engineer, Robotics & Physical AI Integration

Senior Software Engineer, Robotics & Physical AI Integration

Goddard Technologies, Inc. Wilmington, Massachusetts, United States Information Technology

Our Mission: Through inspired engineering and design, we deliver outstanding solutions that positively impact lives. We use an interdisciplinary development process that combines our diverse engineering experience with creative industrial design solutions. We succeed when our partners succeed – it’s all about solving the most complex challenges by creating transformative technology.

Our Culture and People: At Goddard, our most important asset is our people. We don't just work together; we thrive together. We foster a culture of collaboration, continuous learning, and mutual support. We believe in taking exceptionally good care of each other because great teams build great solutions. If you are someone who embodies the values of accountability, inspiration, dedication, efficiency, innovation, integrity, quality, and reliability, we want you on our team.

Come be a part of a workplace where your ideas are valued, your growth is encouraged, and your contributions make a real impact. Join us in shaping the future of transformative technology – together.

The Role: We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to own the integration layer between our AI/ML models and the physical systems they control. This is not a role for someone who writes glue code and calls it done. You will be expected to own the full stack from industrial fieldbus communication and real-time control loops up through the software interfaces that put trained models to work in the real world.

You will work directly with our Machine Learning Engineer to define inference contracts and latency budgets, and with our hardware and mechanical teams to understand what the physical system can and cannot tolerate. If you have strong opinions about how software should behave when it controls hardware that moves, and you debug problems that span firmware, operating systems, and silicon without losing patience, you will thrive here.

• Design and implement software that integrates ML model inference outputs with physical hardware, including motion controllers, servo drives, actuators, and industrial I/O.
• Develop and maintain ROS 2 nodes, hardware abstraction layers, and device drivers for robotics and automation hardware.
• Implement and own communication stacks across industrial field buses including Ether
  
  CAT, CANopen, Modbus, and Profinet.
• Interface with industrial robot controllers (e.g., FANUC, KUKA, ABB, Universal Robots, Yaskawa) via vendor SDKs, proprietary communication interfaces, and standard industrial protocols; translate controller capabilities and constraints into software integration requirements.
• Interface with low-level embedded hardware over SPI, I2C, UART, GPIO, and CAN, and collaborate with embedded engineers to define cross-boundary interfaces.
• Integrate machine vision and camera systems, including image acquisition pipelines, sensor calibration, and routing vision outputs to downstream control and inference logic.
• Collaborate with the ML Engineer to define inference APIs, data contracts, and performance budgets between model outputs and physical actuators.
• Develop real-time and near-real-time control loops on Linux () and RTOS targets, with a clear understanding of scheduling, jitter, and determinism requirements.
• Build hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and integration test infrastructure that can verify system behavior with and without live hardware.
• Document software architecture, interface contracts, timing assumptions, and integration procedures for both internal engineering and regulatory purposes.
• Proactively identify integration risks, timing failures, and hardware/software boundary issues before they surface as field problems.

• 5+ years in systems or robotics software engineering with a demonstrated track record of shipping software that controls physical hardware in production.
• Programming:
  Strong proficiency in C and C++;
  Python for tooling, scripting, and test automation.
• ROS / ROS 2:
  Hands-on experience writing nodes, services, actions,…