Senior Controls Engineer

About Standard Bots

Standard Bots’ mission is to significantly lower the barrier to entry to real-world automation, bringing the power of bits to the world of atoms and unlocking productivity for entire new industries and users.

Our robotics, vision, and networking platform is the basis for our company’s ambitious goals — and a platform of such magnitude requires a deep investment in extensibility, simplicity, and reliability.

Control systems and embedded engineering are the basis of the entire company’s mission. The foundations this team builds empower not only the company, but entire industries.

What you'll do

We’re looking for a seasoned controls engineer to own control quality across our robotic products through best-in-class, modern engineering practices. In this role, you will operate at the boundary between hardware and software — the layer between electrical engineering and motion planning — working closely with electrical, firmware, and higher-level software teams to deliver smooth, reliable, and precisely characterized motion.

This role is onsite at our Glen Cove, NY headquarters a minimum of 3 days per week.

Responsibilities

• Own control performance across our products: smooth motion, tracking accuracy, and high-fidelity impedance control

• Design and own control-loop benchmarking and validation — loop rates, synchronization jitter, tracking error — across communication architectures such as CAN and EtherCAT

• Analytically model in-house actuator Motor -> Gearbox -> Feedback Plants, verify model through physical testing, and determine appropriate Plant tolerance bands for production that maintains model fidelity.

• Implement and document safety-rated monitoring and stop functions to certification rigor

• Ensure maximal servo performance while maintaining stability and rejecting disturbances and suppressing vibration under a broad range of dynamic loading conditions.

• Debug complex system-level issues where root cause may span software, firmware, electrical, or component behavior

• Build test and diagnostic tooling for tuning, hardware characterization, and fault injection

• Act as a technical bridge between hardware and software, advising leadership on technical strategy and mentoring engineers across teams

Software Stack and Ownership Areas

The Controls & Firmware group focuses on foundational technologies including motor and actuator control, embedded communications, system health monitoring/logging, and hardware bring-up.

Tech Stack

• MCUs: STM32

• Languages: C / C++, MATLAB/Simulink

• RTOS: FreeRTOS or similar

• Communications: CAN, EtherCAT

• Supporting Systems: Linux, modern CI/CD tooling

Who you are

We’re looking for engineers who are self-driven, optimistic, creative, and resourceful — excited to apply deep controls expertise to a new class of robotic products.

Skills you'll bring

• Controls Depth: Strong classical controls fundamentals —analytical and heuristic tuning, plant and controller modelling, gain and phase margin analysis, bandwidth modelling and testing — along with real-time signal processing and filtering

• Cross-Domain Fluency: Enough understanding of firmware, electrical, and mechanical systems to find and resolve issues at the borders between them

• Experience:5+ years of proven experience modelling control systems, tuning control loops on real-world systems, and validating models through physical experiments on benchtop equipment

• Clarity of Communication: You excel in written and verbal communication and enjoy leveraging your skills to support your peers

• Impact Driven: You relentlessly seek user impact and value execution over technical idealism

• Proactive Simplicity: You prioritize simplicity, reliability, and velocity and proactively identify opportunities to improve incumbent systems

Nice to have

• Experience with modern control techniques like MPC

• Experience with sensors, especially encoders, and sensor fusion

• Experience interfacing with robotic motion planning systems

• Electrical and board-level experience — comfort with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and DMMs to diagnose timing, signaling, and electrical issues