Controls Engineer, Robotics

About the role

About Tutor

We believe robots are the biggest lever we have to making the physical world a better, more affordable place. But robots are a rounding error in our society: nearly nine out of ten American factories and warehouses don’t even have a single robot, and robots have yet to make their way into our homes or places of business.

Tutor Intelligence is changing that.

Tutor is a robotics research and deployment company, building generally capable robot hardware and artificial intelligence to enable robots to go where no robots have gone before. Sonny is a semi-humanoid robot with frontier dexterity approaching the human form. Cassie does back-breaking work, moving boxes, pallets, and bulk goods for businesses from family-owned manufacturers to some of the largest brands in the world. Tutor robots are manufactured at scale and operate as a network, combining the whole fleet’s learned experience to train ever more capable robot artificial intelligence.

Founded at MIT and headquartered in Watertown, MA, our team is full stack: we design and manufacture robot hardware, train our own models, work directly with the smallest and largest end-customers, and maintain our fleet across the United States. We’re a team of researchers, engineers, technicians, operators, and sellers who love building things and solving hard problems.

Our mission is grand: robots everywhere, for the common good, raising the standard of living across North America, and then the world.

The Role Our robots work in customer facilities with people nearby. The code that decides how an arm moves, how fast, and how it stops is what keeps those people safe. We're looking for a controls engineer to own it.

The work is controls: joint limits, speed limits, stopping distances and stopping times, contact and collision behavior, the loop that turns a motion command into torque, and the monitoring that detects when that loop misbehaves. It is also software work. The code lives in a large codebase that changes every week, and the safety-critical parts of it have to be written, organized, tested, and reviewed so they stay correct through those changes. The person we want has worked in a codebase where a mistake had physical consequences, has written and organized a lot of code there, and is comfortable with the physics underneath it.

You will build the hardware-in-the-loop test bench that runs the control code against real arms and real stop circuits, in continuous integration. You will also keep the evidence current: the measurements and tests that show the arm stops when it should, updated as the code, the arms, and the applications change.

The formal side of safety, risk assessments and the standards customers ask about, is part of the role. We will teach it.

What You'll Do - Own the safety-critical control code for our arms: Limits, stop behavior, collision response, and the monitoring around the control loop

- Work on the control loop itself: Timing, stability, and failure modes, from the motion command down to the drives