--- title: 'Senior Controls Engineer at Watney' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-controls-engineer-watney-san-francisco-p03qb2ej7a7b' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-17' --- # Senior Controls Engineer at Watney - **Company:** Watney - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-06-30 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-17 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/watney/6f1dd768-3d12-4861-b76f-f0bea20f9ea7/application **Skills:** PID Control, H2/H-infinity Control, Model Predictive Control (MPC), Inverse Kinematics, Inverse Dynamics, RNEA, Real-time Systems, Low-latency Systems, Sensor Fusion, SLAM, UKF, Linear Algebra, Calculus, Convex Optimization > The Senior Controls Engineer owns the end-to-end control stack for autonomous robotic systems, designing and tuning low-level controllers and optimal control schemes. This role involves implementing path planning, localization, and mapping algorithms while collaborating with research and deployment teams to ensur... ## Job description ## Our Mission Expand human ambition in the physical world. Critical infrastructure is constrained by labor shortages, hazardous working conditions, and operational complexity. Watney builds and deploys autonomous robotic systems that increase the speed and capacity of buildout, starting with data centers. ## About the Role At Watney, Controls Engineers build the algorithmic foundations that make robots move. Your work will directly unlock a new class of robot capabilities with a uniquely high bar across precision, stability, and compliance while operating in unstructured environments such as warehouses, factories, and data centers. As a Controls Engineer you'll own the entire estimation & controls stack: formulating the math, writing highly optimized code, tuning in the lab, and deploying across a growing fleet of robots operating at customer sites. You will also collaborate with research, hardware, and deployment teams to diagnose and correct failure modes and to design new features for both our robots and teleoperation interfaces. We're looking for someone with technical rigor and sharp engineering instincts who is equally comfortable deploying to robots in production, not just simulation. You should be able to derive controller formulations on a whiteboard, reason about what can cause closed-loop instability, understand and navigate large codebases. ## What You’ll Do - Own the control stack end-to-end: design, implement, and tune low-level controllers (i.e. PID,H2/H-infinity) and optimal control schemes (i.e. MPC) making sure they run reliably and high frequencies. Among many things, these controllers will be used to augment our robots capabilities (e.g. multi-robot coordination) or to make our teleoperation interface as seamless and intuitive as possible. - Own fleet controls metrics and guarantee its performance: evaluate and implement metrics that guarantee high-tracking accuracy and consistent behavior for all of our robots. This includes deploying adaptive-control and auto-tuning schemes to the entire fleet. - Build our robots’ autonomous navigation capabilities: implement optimization and sampling based path planning while localizing and mapping the environment using onboard sensors. - Close the loop with the field: partner with research, hardware, and deployment teams to diagnose real-world failures and translate them into more robust onboard behavior. You May Be a Good Fit If You: - Have hands-on experience implementing and tuning low-level controllers (PID, LQR, etc.) on real-world systems — not just in simulation. - Have formulated and designed optimal and robust control algorithms (robust/stochastic MPC) and understand the tradeoffs between them. - Have worked on manipulation systems and implemented: inverse kinematics, inverse dynamics (RNEA) and planning algorithms. - Have worked with real-time, low-latency systems and are comfortable profiling and optimizing performance-critical code. - Have worked with real-world sensors and built estimators, filters, and sensor-fusion pipelines. - Have implemented localization and mapping algorithms (SLAM, UKF) for wheeled or legged robots. - Have a strong mathematical foundation in linear algebra, calculus, and convex optimization. We’re committed to building a diverse, inclusive team. At Watney Robotics, we welcome people of all backgrounds and identities, and we make hiring decisions based on skills, experience, and potential. If you’re passionate about robotics but don’t meet every requirement, we still encourage you to apply! Curious to learn more? Follow us here on [X](https://x.com/watneyrobotics/) and [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/watneyrobotics/about/) ## About Watney ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Develops autonomous robotics systems to operate datacenter and supercomputing infrastructure, partnering with hyperscalers to accelerate compute scaling. - **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2024 - **Founders**: Ryan Gannon (Co-Founder), Sean Cheong (Co-Founder) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Robotics Engineering / Datacenter Infrastructure Automation - **Target customers**: Hyperscale cloud providers and large-scale data center operators (Enterprise B2B) - **Mission or purpose statement**: “Deploy an abundant, intelligent workforce” by enabling the growth of critical infrastructure through autonomous robots. ## Products & Services - **Autonomous Datacenter Robotics Platform**: A fleet of autonomous robots designed for datacenter buildout and breakfix operations. The system handles physical tasks such as server installation, cable management, maintenance, and repair, reducing human labor and accelerating deployment timelines. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available - **Key Metric** (Private): **$21.0M in total funding** (Seed round closed May 30, 2025) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Conviction, Abstract, A* (A-star). Partners with the world’s largest hyperscalers (names not disclosed). - **Growth Signals**: - Headcount grew **183.3% year-over-year** to 11 employees (as of mid-2026) - Monthly headcount growth of **+6.2%** - Active job postings rose **+28.6% month-over-month** and **+350% quarter-over-quarter** - Currently hiring for 9 roles spanning engineering, operations, and strategy ## Competitive Advantages - **Deep domain focus**: Solely dedicated to datacenter and supercomputing infrastructure – a narrow, high-stakes vertical with massive scaling demand. - **Elite founding team**: Includes former GSM for iPhone, former founding engineer at Worldcoin, and a builder of the world’s fastest EV racecar (ETH Zurich). - **Early partnerships with hyperscalers**: Already working with the largest cloud providers, providing critical validation and a clear path to production. - **Full-stack ownership**: Company is moving from prototype to production fleets, offering engineers end-to-end impact from hardware to software. ## Strategic Focus - **Scale from prototype to production fleets**: Transitioning from small-scale deployments to large autonomous fleets. - **Deepen hyperscaler partnerships**: Expand contracts and joint development roadmaps with major cloud providers. - **Grow engineering and operations teams**: Aggressively hiring across robotics, software, facilities management, and deployment strategy to support production scaling. ## Why Work Here - **In-Office culture**: All roles are based in San Francisco (HQ); the company emphasizes in-person collaboration. - **Ground-floor opportunity**: With outsized ownership and visibility, employees shape the “rollout playbook” for a category-defining robotics company. - **Technical challenge**: Work on real systems that combine robotics, AI, hardware, and infrastructure at scale. - **Notable peers**: Colleagues include alumni from Scale AI, Amazon Web Services, Tools for Humanity, Warburg Pincus, and the US Army Corps of Engineers. - **Growth trajectory**: A very young company (founded 2024) with rapid hiring and clear product-market fit, ideal for early-stage career builders. ## Sources 1. [watneyrobotics.com](https://watneyrobotics.com/) 2. [linkedin.com/company/watneyrobotics](https://www.linkedin.com/company/watneyrobotics) 3. [builtin.com/company/watney-robotics-inc](https://builtin.com/company/watney-robotics-inc) 4. 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