Senior Developer Robotics

Your mission

Aisle 14 looks exactly like aisle 15. Both changed overnight because someone moved four pallets at 3am.
Our robots have to handle that: know where they are, decide where to go, and keep moving a tonne of freight past human beings and dynamic obstacles without drama. The robot doesn't get to decide people are the problem. It has to work around them, every time. On someone else's hardware, in someone else's building, on a Monday morning.
You're not just building another algorithm. You're accountable for whether the robot copes with reality.

What you'll do

• Drive our robotics software forward
  For mobile robots on real industrial floors, not in a demo, not in a benchmark. What's worth building properly and what's worth working around for now is a call you make together with the team.
• Design and build across the stack
  Navigation and path planning, obstacle avoidance, and how one robot's behaviour holds up once it's one of dozens sharing the same floor. Rarely solo work: a change in one module ripples straight into the others.
• Test where it actually counts
  Simulation first, then different hardware, different robots, real sites. The gap between those two is where most of the work hides.
• Make the technical calls in your area
  On a team this size your calls ship instead of getting reviewed to death, but you bring them to the team first, and you live with them afterwards.
• Be the lighthouse
  The one people steer by when the robot does something nobody can explain. Whether a problem gets fixed where it showed up or where it came from is your judgement, worked out with whoever else is in the room.
• And if localization is your deep end
  …our multi-modal Live SLAM package would love someone who lives in it.

Your profile

Must-have

• 5+ yrs building robotics software that made it into production
• Shipped on hardware and in environments you didn't control. Simulation-only doesn't count
• C++17+, and code your colleagues can pick up without calling you
• Hands-on with real hardware: LiDAR, IMUs, motor controllers, and a healthy distrust of all of them and their particular quirks
• A systems view. You know how navigation, perception and integration fail together, not just apart
• Collaborative dev on an industrial product: review, versioning, CI
• Comfortable working on Linux

Nice-to-have

• Depth in SLAM, sensor fusion or computer vision. SLAM is where our hardest problems currently live, so if that's your thing, say so loudly
• ROS 2, or ROS 1 experience that carries over
• Intralogistics, warehouse automation, industrial deployments

Not for you if

• you're early career or coming straight out of studies. No hard feelings, we just don't have the ramp-up capacity right now

Who you are

Those are the basics. Equally important is what you bring as a person:

• Keen to work closely with the people around you? We got you.
• A requirement doesn't add up, and you'd rather ask now than build it twice? Yes please.
• Making the people around you better counts as part of your job? That's half the role.
• Being the go-to person doesn't scare you? We see you.
• Ambitious goals, and colleagues who are genuinely good at this? That's the deal.
• We're looking for someone who drives themselves and keeps learning, not someone who waits to be pointed at a ticket.

Side quest

Same aisle, 100 runs a day, six months. Run 101: the robot's localization is off by 3 m, and it is very confident about it. Nothing in the software changed.
How would you find out what happened? Walk us through your approach, in the order you'd work.

Half a page. Bullets fine. No right answer, we want the reasoning. And if localization happens to be your deep end, feel free to go further than half a page.
Send it instead of a cover letter ("work sample upload") additionally to your CV. A good answer gets you a conversation, fast.

What we offer

• Your rhythm matters most, which is why we don't do such a thing as core hours
• Hybrid work environment
• Deutschland-Ticket, subsidised
• Urban Sports Club, subsidised
• Learning budget a year, spend it on whatever moves you
• Corporate Benefits for exclusive discounts
• …and of course plenty of snacks and drinks in the office