Robotics Engineer 1

At Blue Origin, we envision millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth. We’re working to develop reusable, safe, and low-cost space vehicles and systems within a culture of safety, collaboration, and inclusion. ## About the Role The New Product Formulation team turns ideas and early concepts into credible products. This role combines robotics simulation, learned manipulation policies, and hands-on hardware to answer the questions that shape new robotic products. You’ll build simulation environments, train and evaluate robot manipulation policies, operate real hardware, and run the experiments that inform system-level trades on mobility, manipulation, power, and compute. The work spans the full stack — writing control software in ROS 2, collecting teleoperation data, and presenting trade study results to stakeholders. ## What You’ll Do - Develop, train, fine-tune, and evaluate robot manipulation policies (e.g., vision-language-action models, imitation learning, reinforcement learning) on multi-step tasks. - Collect teleoperation demonstration data and build the data pipelines used for policy training and benchmarking. - Build and maintain simulation environments in NVIDIA Omniverse, Isaac Sim, and Isaac Lab, including custom terrain, lighting, and physical conditions, and work to close the sim-to-real gap. - Integrate, bring up, and operate robot hardware, including arms, dexterous hands and grippers, cameras, force/torque sensors, and commercial platforms. - Write and maintain robot software in ROS 2, including control interfaces, perception pipelines, and safety limits on joints, forces, and workspace. - Support system-level trade studies for mobility, power, thermal, compute, and communications by running analyses, simulations, and prototype tests that inform design decisions. - Document results clearly and share findings with the broader team and stakeholders. ## Minimum Qualifications - Minimum of a B.S. degree in Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, or a related field. - Hands-on experience with real robot hardware through coursework, research, internships, or project teams (e.g., competition robotics, rover teams, lab work). - Proficiency in Python. Working knowledge of C++. - Familiarity with robot kinematics, dynamics, and control fundamentals. - Experience with at least one robotics simulation environment. - Comfort working in a lab: assembling hardware, wiring, debugging sensors, and safely operating robots. - Must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum. ## Preferred Qualifications - M.S. in a relevant field, or equivalent research experience. - Experience training or fine-tuning learned robot policies (imitation learning, RL, VLA/foundation models) using frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX. - Experience with ROS 2. - Experience with NVIDIA Omniverse, Isaac Sim, or Isaac Lab. - Experience with industrial or collaborative robot arms (e.g., Universal Robots). - Experience with physics-based terrain, contact, or soil-interaction modeling. - Exposure to computer vision and perception for manipulation (pose estimation, segmentation, depth sensing). - Experience with teleoperation systems or data collection for robot learning. - Familiarity with designing hardware for harsh or extreme operating environments. - Experience working across software, simulation, and hardware, and enjoyment of switching between them. ## Base Pay Range WA applicants: $110,623.00–$154,871.85. Other site ranges may differ.