Staff Robotics Engineer
About Bedrock Ocean Exploration
Bedrock Ocean builds and operates autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that collect georeferenced ocean-floor data at commercial scale. We deliver bathymetric and imagery data products to customers through our own platform, and we're scaling toward continuous, around-the-clock data collection campaigns spanning months at a time. Making an autonomous vehicle reliably do the right thing at the bottom of the ocean is the hardest problem we have, and this role sets the technical direction for it.
Headquartered in Richmond, California, Bedrock Ocean Exploration is building autonomous ocean intelligence that will enable the ocean economy to solve the world's most pressing challenges in maritime security, infrastructure, energy, and climate. Our modular architecture, driven by the autonomous underwater vehicles, Trident (command and control), and Mosaic (subsea data fusion), delivers entirely new intelligence capabilities for government and commercial partners. Missions mobilize from any vessel of opportunity in 24 to 72 hours, and our automated pipeline returns comprehensive insights in hours, not weeks like the incumbents, keeping crews safe on shore while cutting cost and time.
The Role
The Staff Robotics Engineer sets the technical direction for autonomy and vehicle software across our growing fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles. You operate a level above any single subsystem, owning the architecture that ties together onboard software, GNC and state estimation, sensing, and mission autonomy so vehicles run reliably for long, continuous missions. You're the engineer the robotics team turns to when a problem spans disciplines and is genuinely hard.
This role exists because reliable autonomy underwater is a systems problem, not a single-subsystem one, and we need someone who can hold the whole vehicle software system in their head and make the architectural calls that keep it robust as it grows. You'll come in with deep robotics judgment and the room to shape how autonomy and vehicle software are built at Bedrock.
You'll work across GNC, vehicle management (faults), onboard comms, hardware, sensing, software, and field operations, spend time in the loop with real vehicles, and champion practical AI adoption so the team spends its time on the hard autonomy problems.
What You'll Do
Own the architecture of the vehicle software system and drive it toward a modular design: clean, versioned interfaces across onboard software, GNC and state estimation, sensing, vehicle management, and mission autonomy, with swappable sensor and payload modules, so subsystems evolve independently and software carries across vehicle variants and future scaling.
Lead the hardest cross-disciplinary robotics problems end to end, anticipating future missions and minimizing the cost of change.
Set and raise standards for how the robotics team builds, tests, and validates vehicle software, using quality metrics to find gaps and recommend fixes against accepted frameworks.
Drive rigorous testing across simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, and field trials, and own diagnosis of issues anywhere in the vehicle software domain so problems surface on a bench instead of at sea.
Improve autonomy and vehicle behaviors so vehicles handle long, continuous missions with minimal intervention.
Own fault management and vehicle health end to end: detection, isolation, and recovery (FDIR), safe-state and abort-to-surface behaviors, and graceful degradation, so vehicles keep themselves safe and get home when something fails far from any operator.
Share in the robotics on-call rotation for live, around-the-clock campaigns, triaging and resolving vehicle-software and autonomy issues on active missions, and building the runbooks, telemetry, and escalation paths that keep on-call sustainable as campaigns scale.
Design for fleet scale: standardize vehicle software across the fleet and build safe over-the-air deployment with versioning and rollback, so continuous, around-the-clock campaigns across many vehicles stay reliable and updatable.
Make sure vehicles come home with good data: reliable onboard capture and logging, sensor time-synchronization, and onboard quality checks that catch a bad mission early rather than at the dock.
Hold expertise across the vehicle software domain and its adjacent disciplines (GNC, sensing, hardware), and design for safety and reliability by example.
Break down and prioritize the vehicle-software roadmap, manage commitments, and handle risk, change, and uncertainty across the team.
Multiply the team: mentor robotics engineers, foster a culture of feedback and knowledge sharing, drive technical alignment, and facilitate decisions across GNC, hardware, sensing, and software.
Champion practical AI adoption across the robotics workflow- building and using AI agents, adopting proven AI libraries and tools, and holding AI-assisted work to the same production-ready, standards-compliant bar as everything else the team ships.
Document and define the strategic architecture for autonomy and vehicle software, and drive alignment on it with both senior leadership and engineering peers.
What We're Looking For
8+ years building robotics or autonomous-systems software, including at least 5-7 years in a commercial, production robotics environment shipping at scale, plus staff-level technical leadership across subsystems or teams.
Deep experience architecting vehicle or autonomy software that stayed robust, modular, and scalable as it grew, with interfaces that held up through real change.
Strong fundamentals in C++ and/or Python, and hands-on experience with ROS or ROS 2 on real hardware.
Depth in one or more of GNC, state estimation, sensor fusion, or mission autonomy, with breadth across the rest.
A track record building fault detection and recovery (FDIR), health monitoring, or safe-state behaviors into systems that must run unattended and recover on their own.
Experience standardizing and safely deploying software across a fleet of vehicles or embedded devices, including over-the-air updates, versioning, and rollback.
A record of raising the technical bar for a robotics team through standards, mentoring, and review.
Comfort with the realities of physical, safety-critical systems, intermittent connectivity, and field operations, including willingness to take part in an on-call rotation supporting continuous, around-the-clock missions.
Excellent communication and the ability to drive alignment across robotics, hardware, and software.
Able to work on-site in the Richmond, CA office regularly.
Nice to Have
Experience with underwater, marine, aerial, or ground autonomous vehicles.
Familiarity with sensor payloads such as sonar, cameras, or inertial/navigation systems, and with sensor fusion.
Background owning autonomy or vehicle systems through field deployment.
Background applying AI or AI agents in a production engineering or autonomy context.
Some connection to the ocean: professional, academic, or personal.
Why This Role Matters
Our biggest operational goal depends on vehicles that run reliably and autonomously for long stretches with a small team behind them. The autonomy and vehicle-software architecture you set determines whether we can run continuous campaigns at scale, and whether vehicles come home with good data. This is among the highest-leverage work at the company.
Not a Fit If…
Your leverage comes only from the subsystem you personally own, not from the architecture and team around it.
You want clean, fully-connected environments and have no patience for physical, safety-critical systems.
You prefer inheriting an established autonomy stack over defining how it gets built.
You treat AI tooling as a curiosity rather than something worth building into how the team works.
Your robotics experience is all startup-prototype, academic, or R&D work, with nothing shipped and run at commercial, production scale.
You are not able to commute to our Richmond, CA office regularly
Compensation
Base salary range depending on location and experience, plus comprehensive employee benefits and equity. For the San Francisco Bay area, the range is $190,000-$235,000.
Work Authorization
Candidates must have legal authorization to work in the United States without visa sponsorship. Bedrock does not sponsor employment visas.
Due to the nature of our government and defense work, candidates must be eligible to obtain a U.S. Secret security clearance if requested. An active Secret or higher clearance is not required to apply, but candidates who hold one are strongly preferred.
Bedrock Ocean Exploration is an equal opportunity employer.