Robotics Software Engineer

Job Posting Title:

Robotics Software Engineer

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Hiring Department:

Department of Computer Science

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Position Open To:

All Applicants

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Weekly Scheduled Hours:

40

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FLSA Status:

Exempt from FLSA

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Earliest Start Date:

Immediately

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Position Duration:

Expected to Continue

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Location:

UT MAIN CAMPUS

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Job Details:

General Notes

The Center for Human and Robot Co-Adaptation (HRC) brings together six universities: The University of Texas at Austin, Indiana University Bloomington, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, University of Utah, and Yale University. Together, we study how people and robots can, do, and might adapt to one another over months and years as needs, skills, expectations, and social contexts change. The Center unites researchers across robotics, AI, cognitive science, social science, data, and ethics to establish a new science of human-robot co-adaptation. This science will be developed, tested, and refined through the Human Environment with Robots (HERO) Facility Network: long-term deployments of assistive robots in real-world settings including student dorms, cafés, museums, homes, hospitals, and assisted-living facilities.

The Center is supported by a five-year, $30 million award from the National Science Foundation through its Science and Technology Centers (STC) program.

Purpose

The Center Robotics Software Engineer will develop, integrate, maintain, and deploy the common robotics software infrastructure that supports HERO deployments and foundational Center research. This position will create a standardized software stack that can support multiple robotic platforms and deployment sites, while providing researchers across the Center with reliable interfaces for developing, integrating, testing, and deploying new capabilities. 

The successful candidate will be a strong software engineer with experience building and debugging complex robotic systems. They will work across research and engineering teams to translate rapidly evolving research software into robust deployable systems, while maintaining the testing, configuration, monitoring, and deployment infrastructure needed for long-running real-world robot operation. The engineer will be expected to take ownership of the Center's shared robotics software infrastructure, establish sound software engineering practices, and develop safeguards that allow new capabilities to be integrated without compromising the reliability of ongoing HERO deployments. The Robotics Software Engineer will work closely with the Robotics Hardware Engineer to coordinate platform integration, deployment readiness, troubleshooting, and upgrades across the Center’s robotic systems.

Responsibilities

Center Robotics Software Platform Ownership and Standardization

• Own the architecture, integration, operational readiness, and maintenance of the Center's common robotics software stack.

• Develop and maintain standardized software interfaces and configurations that support multiple robot platforms and can be replicated across HERO sites.

• Establish common abstractions and interfaces for robot capabilities, sensing, communication, data collection, monitoring, and other shared functionality.

• Evaluate new robotics software frameworks, libraries, models, and supporting technologies and recommend their adoption when appropriate.

• Coordinate closely with Center researchers and the Center Robotics Hardware Engineer to ensure that the software infrastructure supports the scientific and operational goals of the Center.

Research Software Integration and Robotics Systems Engineering

• Work with research teams across the Center to integrate new algorithms and capabilities into deployable robotic systems.

• Develop and maintain ROS 2 packages, interfaces, launch systems, configuration infrastructure, and supporting software needed to connect research components into complete robotic applications.

• Independently diagnose and resolve complex software failures spanning application code, middleware, operating systems, networking, drivers, dependencies, distributed computing, and hardware/software interfaces.

• Design software architectures that allow experimental research components to evolve while maintaining stable interfaces and reliable operation of the overall system.

• Support integration of computationally intensive capabilities, including perception, machine learning, foundation models, planning, and other AI systems running locally or on remote computing resources.

Reliability, Testing, and HERO Software Operations

• Maintain the Center robotics software stack in a reliable and continuously deployable state.

• Develop automated testing, continuous integration, simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, monitoring, and validation systems to identify problems before deployment.

• Establish staged deployment procedures, including simulation and digital-twin testing, local validation, canary deployments, and controlled rollout to HERO sites.

• Develop logging, diagnostics, health monitoring, fault detection, and recovery mechanisms for long-running robot deployments.

• Establish repeatable procedures for software installation, configuration, deployment, update, rollback, recovery, and validation.

• Support diagnosis and resolution of software issues during HERO studies and deployments.

Multi-Site Software Deployment and Technical Coordination

• Maintain common source repositories, software releases, configuration records, documentation, and deployment procedures for use across HERO sites.

• Support replication and validation of the Center software stack across robot platforms and participating institutions.

• Maintain configuration and version control across deployed systems while accommodating necessary site- and platform-specific differences.

• Coordinate software releases and upgrades across sites to minimize fragmentation and maintain interoperability.

• Work with researchers and local technical personnel to troubleshoot site-specific software, networking, computing, and deployment issues.

• Develop documentation and tools that allow Center researchers to efficiently develop against, test with, and contribute to the shared software infrastructure.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related technical field.

• Two or more years of relevant professional or research software engineering experience involving robotic, autonomous, distributed, or similarly complex systems.

• Strong programming proficiency in C++ and Python or comparable languages used in robotics systems.

• Proficiency with Linux-based systems and experience diagnosing operating-system, process, dependency, networking, and software-interface problems.

• Experience developing software with ROS 2 or comparable robotic middleware.

• Demonstrated ability to design, integrate, test, and debug complex software systems spanning multiple processes and components.

• Experience with modern software engineering practices including version control, code review, automated testing, build systems, and software documentation.

• Strong critical-thinking, debugging, and root-cause-analysis skills.

• Strong written, verbal, and interpersonal communication skills and the ability to work effectively with researchers and engineers across multiple teams.

Relevant education and experience may be substituted as appropriate.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience developing and deploying software for mobile robots, mobile manipulators, or other autonomous systems operating in real-world environments.

• Deep experience with ROS 2, including nodes, topics, services, actions, parameters, launch systems, lifecycle management, TF, timing, logging, and distributed robotic systems.

• Experience architecting reusable robotics software across multiple robot platforms or hardware configurations.

• Experience with continuous integration and deployment, automated testing, simulation-based testing, and hardware-in-the-loop testing for robotic systems.

• Experience with Docker or other containers, systemd, shell scripting, networking tools, build systems, package management, and automated system configuration.

• Experience with robotic simulation or digital-twin environments such as Gazebo, Isaac Sim, or comparable systems.

• Experience developing monitoring, logging, observability, watchdog, fault-detection, and automated recovery infrastructure for long-running autonomous systems.

• Experience integrating machine-learning, computer-vision, large pretrained models, or other computationally intensive AI systems into real-time robotic applications.

• Experience integrating robotic systems with remote, cloud, cluster, or high-performance computing resources.

• Experience with robot data collection, synchronization, recording, replay, and management of large multimodal datasets.

• Experience managing software releases, configurations, compatibility, and deployment across a fleet of robotic systems or multiple operational sites.

• Demonstrated ability to take ownership of an unfamiliar robotics software system, understand its architecture, diagnose failures, improve its reliability, and evolve it while maintaining operational continuity.

Salary Range

$120,000 + depending on qualifications

Working Conditions

• Typical office environment.

Required Materials

• Resume/CV

• 3 work references with their contact information; at least one reference should be from a supervisor
• Letter of interest

Important for applicants who are NOT current university employees or contingent workers: You will be prompted to submit your resume the first time you apply, then you will be provided an option to upload a new Resume for subsequent applications. Any additional Required Materials (letter of interest, references, etc.) will be uploaded in the Application Questions section; you will be able to multi-select additional files. Before submitting your online job application, ensure that ALL Required Materials have been uploaded.  Once your job application has been submitted, you cannot make changes.

Important for Current university employees and contingent workers: As a current university employee or contingent worker, you MUST apply within Workday by searching for Find UT Jobs. If you are a current University employee, log-in to Workday, navigate to your Worker Profile, click the Career link in the left hand navigation menu and then update the sections in your Professional Profile before you apply. This information will be pulled in to your application. The application is one page and you will be prompted to upload your resume. In addition, you must respond to the application questions presented to upload any additional Required Materials (letter of interest, references, etc.) that were noted above.

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Employment Eligibility:

Regular staff who have been employed in their current position for the last six continuous months are eligible for openings being recruited for through University-Wide or Open Recruiting, to include both promotional opportunities and lateral transfers. Staff who are promotion/transfer eligible may apply for positions without supervisor approval.

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Retirement Plan Eligibility:

The retirement plan for this position is Teacher Retirement System of Texas (TRS), subject to the position being at least 20 hours per week and at least 135 days in length.

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Background Checks:

A criminal history background check will be required for finalist(s) under consideration for this position.

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Equal Opportunity Employer:

The University of Texas at Austin, as an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer, complies with all applicable federal and state laws regarding nondiscrimination and affirmative action. The University is committed to a policy of equal opportunity for all persons and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, marital status, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, disability, religion, or veteran status in employment, educational programs and activities, and admissions.

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Pay Transparency:

The University of Texas at Austin will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant. However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by the employer, or (c) consistent with the contractor’s legal duty to furnish information.

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Employment Eligibility Verification:

If hired, you will be required to complete the federal Employment Eligibility Verification I-9 form.  You will be required to present acceptable and original documents to prove your identity and authorization to work in the United States.  Documents need to be presented no later than the third day of employment.  Failure to do so will result in loss of employment at the university.

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E-Verify:

The University of Texas at Austin use E-Verify to check the work authorization of all new hires effective May 2015. The university’s company ID number for purposes of E-Verify is 854197. For more information about E-Verify, please see the following:

• E-Verify Poster (English and Spanish) [PDF]
• Right to Work Poster (English) [PDF]
• Right to Work Poster (Spanish) [PDF]

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Compliance:

Employees may be required to report violations of law under Title IX and the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Crime Statistics Act (Clery Act). If this position is identified a Campus Security Authority (Clery Act), you will be notified and provided resources for reporting. Responsible employees under Title IX are defined and outlined in HOP-3031.

The Clery Act requires all prospective employees be notified of the availability of the Annual Security and Fire Safety report. You may access the most recent report here or obtain a copy at University Compliance Services, 1616 Guadalupe Street, UTA 2.206, Austin, Texas 78701.