Senior Autonomy Controls Engineer – Learning-Based Control

Job description

Teleo, a Havoc company, is a robotics company that transforms construction heavy equipment, including loaders, dozers, excavators, and trucks, into autonomous robots for commercial and defense applications. Our technology enables a single operator to supervise and control multiple machines simultaneously, delivering significant productivity gains while improving operator safety and comfort. Teleo was founded by a team of experienced technology leaders who previously led the development of Lyft's Self-Driving Car program and Google Street View. Teleo recently announced its merger with Havoc AI, a fast-growing defense technology company developing coordinated fleets of autonomous maritime vessels. This is a unique opportunity to join a team building technology with real-world impact. You will work on cutting-edge 100,000-pound autonomous robots and engineer complex systems at the intersection of hardware, software, robotics, and AI. About the Role Own the transition from manually tuned MPC-based vehicle control to learning-driven control policies that adapt across vehicles with minimal human intervention, while maintaining safety and interpretability. ### Core Responsibilities - Practical understanding of vehicle dynamics and system identification - Practical experience in generating test plans, collecting real-world data, and using real-world data for system identification of plant models for automatic control. - Design and implement learning-based control approaches (imitation learning, reinforcement learning, hybrid MPC + learning) - Reduce dependence on hand-tuned control parameters through data-driven methods - Integrate learned controllers into the existing vehicle control stack safely and incrementally - Define interfaces between classical control (MPC, PID, state estimation) and learning-based components - Work closely with the Principal Controls Engineer to translate classical control insights into learning-friendly formulations - Establish validation criteria for learned control policies before real-vehicle deployment ### Required Qualifications - 2-3 years of experience with experimental data collection and data analysis to estimate parameters of a plant model used for automatic control - Strong software engineering skills in C, C++, or Python (production-quality code) - Deep understanding of modern robotics control systems - Experience with learning-based control or policy optimization for real-world systems - Comfort working close to hardware and real-time constraints ### Preferred Qualification - Reinforcement learning or imitation learning for control - Model-based RL, residual learning, or hybrid MPC architectures - Control under uncertainty and partial observability - Debugging and validating control systems on physical platforms ### Bonus Points - Experience deploying learned controllers on vehicles or mobile robots - Familiarity with safety-constrained learning methods - Background spanning both classical and modern control theory