---
title: 'Staff Robot Controls Integration Engineer at Rhoda AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-robot-controls-integration-engineer-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-3kmgxqrja023'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Staff Robot Controls Integration Engineer at Rhoda AI

- **Company:** Rhoda AI
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-07-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/rhoda-ai/f2b5d1e0-2c7a-43e5-999c-8c4c0c208741

## Job description

At Rhoda AI, we’re building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. We own the full robotics stack from high-performance hardware and robot systems to the infrastructure and state-of-the-art foundation world models that control our robots. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling long-tail edge cases, made possible by our cutting edge research and end-to-end system design. We've raised over $450M and are investing aggressively in model research, infrastructure, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make generalist robotics a reality.

## ABOUT THE ROLE

We're looking for a Staff Robot Controls Integration Engineer to own the bridge between our control algorithms and real-world hardware — the critical point where physics meets firmware. You'll integrate motor control stacks, real-time communication protocols, and sensing systems into a cohesive, predictable platform that performs reliably in demanding field conditions. This role sits at the intersection of embedded firmware, control theory, and hardware bringup: you'll validate control behavior across the full stack, diagnose timing and performance issues, and drive fixes that make our robots actually work.

## WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Control algorithm integration: Take control strategies from MATLAB/Simulink into real-time firmware on microcontrollers and real-time Linux systems. Validate that implemented behavior matches design intent through dynamic testing and closed-loop validation.
- Real-time protocol bringup: Integrate and commission communication buses (CAN, EtherCAT) connecting motor controllers, microcontrollers, and compute hardware. Conduct encoder linearization, sensor calibration, and protocol timing verification to achieve reliable sub-millisecond latency.
- Motor and actuator characterization: Work with firmware teams to validate motor performance — cogging torque compensation, field-oriented control tuning, friction modeling. Conduct dynamic testing (Bode analysis, step response) to verify control bandwidth and stability margins.
- Hardware-in-the-loop system design: Build and operate test benches that simulate robot dynamics, inject faults, and validate closed-loop behavior before deployment. Create repeatable, automated tests that catch control instability and latency issues early.
- Real-time performance profiling: Measure and optimize latency paths across the stack — firmware interrupt handlers, communication pipeline, control loops. Identify and close timing violations that degrade control quality.
- Troubleshooting and root-cause analysis: When robots exhibit unexpected behavior in the field, methodically isolate the cause — is it the control law, firmware implementation, communication delay, or hardware? Turn findings into durable fixes working alongside Firmware and Hardware teams.

## WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

- Bachelor's degree in Electrical, Mechanical, or closely related engineering discipline.
- 8+ Years of experience working on at least one of the following areas:
- Hands-on motor controls: You've implemented or tuned PID loops, field-oriented control, torque control, or trajectory tracking on real hardware. Comfortable reasoning about poles, stability, and bandwidth.
- Real-time systems and firmware: You understand interrupt latency, real-time constraints, and the gap between algorithm and implementation. Experience with real-time Linux, microcontroller programming, or RTOS.
- Communication protocols: Solid experience with CAN, CAN FD, or EtherCAT — protocol analysis, debugging, timing verification. Familiar with CANoe, Vector tooling, or oscilloscope-based signal capture.
- Sensor integration and validation: You've brought up encoders, IMUs, force/torque sensors. Understand aliasing, noise filtering, calibration, and how sensor delay cascades into control performance.
- HiL and SIL: You design tests that matter — fault-injection tests that probe stability margins, saturation behavior, and graceful degradation. Experience with Simulink, FPGA platforms, or equivalent.
- Control theory: You understand dynamics, Laplace transforms, Bode plots, poles and zeros. Can read a control diagram and reason about closed-loop behavior and system stability.

## NICE TO HAVE

- Experience with EtherCAT, SOEM, Beckhoff hardware, or TwinCAT real-time platforms.
- Proficiency in MATLAB/Simulink for modeling, parameter identification, and control-system analysis.
- Python or C++ for test automation, firmware tooling, and data post-processing.
- Experience with motor characterization: cogging torque analysis, friction modeling, thermal dynamics.
- Familiarity with functional safety standards and how control performance ties into safety requirements.
- Prior experience supporting fielded systems, turning customer-reported instabilities into durable firmware fixes.

## About Rhoda AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Rhoda AI builds robot foundation models that learn from internet-scale video to enable manipulation-capable robots to generalize in real-world industrial environments.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed + Series A; $680M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, CA, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Jagdeep Singh (CEO), Eric Chan (Chief Scientist), Changan Chen (Chief Research Officer), Andrew Wooten, Gordon Wetzstein (Scientific Advisor) [rhoda.ai/team](https://www.rhoda.ai/team)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Hardware
- **Target customers**: B2B – industrial enterprises in automotive, manufacturing, logistics, and e-commerce
- **Mission/purpose**: “Building at the frontier of embodied intelligence” and “Designing intelligence for the real world” – deploying general-purpose robot foundation models that adapt to the variability of commercial and industrial environments. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/) | [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai)

## Products & Services
- **Rhoda Robot Platform (Hardware + Software)**: A turnkey robotic system with custom actuators (25kg rated, 40kg peak payload), safety-rated vision, wheel-base, and brakes in every actuator. The platform runs the **Direct Video Action** model, which pre-trains on over a million real-world videos and post-trains on task-specific robot data. Long-context windows enable single-shot learning from human demonstrations without retraining. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)
- **FutureVision Intelligence Layer**: A proprietary architecture that handles real-world industrial tasks autonomously by generalizing beyond conventional VLA pipelines. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)
- **Deployment Services**: End-to-end solutions for tasks such as returns processing, bearing decanting, container breakdown, and material transport in logistics and e-commerce facilities. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding **$680M** – Seed round $67.4M (April 2024), Series A $162.6M (April 2025), and Series A $450M (March 2026) with 4 investors. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not individually named in available sources; partners include customers in automotive, manufacturing, logistics, and e-commerce. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount growth of **+20% monthly** (LinkedIn reports 55 employees; Built In reports 73 employees – conflicting data). Talent sourced from companies like QuantumScape, Flexiv Robotics, Scale AI, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, and Stanford University. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai) | [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Direct Video Action architecture** with web-scale video pre-training gives a strong prior on motion, physics, and dynamics, enabling generalization beyond lab settings.
- **Custom high-performance actuators** (25kg rated, 40kg peak) with safety-rated brakes and vision – designed for 3+ years of continuous operation at rated payload.
- **Long-context in-context learning** allows the robot to perform tasks single-shot from human demonstrations without retraining.
- **Turnkey industrial deployments** that handle ambiguity and variability (e.g., debris, transparent bags, heavy boxes) – tasks customers initially believed could not be automated. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)

## Strategic Focus
- Scaling robot intelligence through a pre-training/post-training paradigm, moving from controlled labs to reliable production environments.
- Expanding commercial deployments across automotive, manufacturing, logistics, and e-commerce verticals.
- Pursuing a path to **physical AGI** by combining foundation models with custom hardware for real-world adaptability. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “Building at the frontier of embodied intelligence” – emphasis on hard problems, first-principles thinking, and category-defining systems. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Work policy**: Hybrid workspace (employees combine remote and on-site work), with offices in Mountain View and Palo Alto, CA. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Engineering culture**: Strong research focus (Chief Research Officer, Chief Scientist, many research engineers/scientists). Recent job postings include Research Scientist, Robot Perception Engineer, Mechanical Engineer, Fullstack Engineer, and Product Manager. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Notable perks**: Not explicitly listed, but the company is well-funded ($680M) and at an early stage (founded 2024), offering significant growth opportunity and impact.

## Sources
1. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/) – Company website (product, technology, commercial applications)
2. [rhoda.ai/careers](https://www.rhoda.ai/careers) – Careers page
3. [rhoda.ai/team](https://www.rhoda.ai/team) – Leadership team and co-founders
4. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai) – Built In profile (employee count, offices, job listings, hybrid policy)
5. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai) – LinkedIn company page (funding, headcount, executive list, talent sources)

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