{"id":459147,"url":"https://alion.io/job/bedrock-ocean-staff-robotics-engineer","title":"Staff Robotics Engineer","company":{"id":176571,"name":"Bedrock Ocean Exploration","domain":"bedrockocean.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/bedrock-ocean","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"Robotics","role_family":"Robotics","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Brooklyn, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":190000,"max":235000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":235000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"ROS","optional":false},{"name":"Sensor Fusion","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-18T21:42:35Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-18","last_verified_at":"2026-10-25T16:47:59Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":67,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":67},"description":"About Bedrock Ocean Exploration\nBedrock 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.\nHeadquartered 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.\nThe Role\nThe 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.\nThis 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.\nYou'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.\nWhat You'll Do\nOwn 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.\n\nLead the hardest cross-disciplinary robotics problems end to end, anticipating future missions and minimizing the cost of change.\n\nSet 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.\n\nDrive 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.\n\nImprove autonomy and vehicle behaviors so vehicles handle long, continuous missions with minimal intervention.\n\nOwn 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.\n\nShare 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.\n\nDesign 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.\n\nMake 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.\n\nHold expertise across the vehicle software domain and its adjacent disciplines (GNC, sensing, hardware), and design for safety and reliability by example.\n\nBreak down and prioritize the vehicle-software roadmap, manage commitments, and handle risk, change, and uncertainty across the team.\n\nMultiply 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.\n\nChampion 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.\n\nDocument and define the strategic architecture for autonomy and vehicle software, and drive alignment on it with both senior leadership and engineering peers.\n\nWhat We're Looking For\n8+ 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.\n\nDeep experience architecting vehicle or autonomy software that stayed robust, modular, and scalable as it grew, with interfaces that held up through real change.\n\nStrong fundamentals in C++ and/or Python, and hands-on experience with ROS or ROS 2 on real hardware.\n\nDepth in one or more of GNC, state estimation, sensor fusion, or mission autonomy, with breadth across the rest.\n\nA 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.\n\nExperience standardizing and safely deploying software across a fleet of vehicles or embedded devices, including over-the-air updates, versioning, and rollback.\n\nA record of raising the technical bar for a robotics team through standards, mentoring, and review.\n\nComfort 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.\n\nExcellent communication and the ability to drive alignment across robotics, hardware, and software.\n\nNice to Have\nExperience with underwater, marine, aerial, or ground autonomous vehicles.\n\nFamiliarity with sensor payloads such as sonar, cameras, or inertial/navigation systems, and with sensor fusion.\n\nBackground owning autonomy or vehicle systems through field deployment.\n\nBackground applying AI or AI agents in a production engineering or autonomy context.\n\nSome connection to the ocean: professional, academic, or personal.\n\nWhy This Role Matters\nOur 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.\nNot a Fit If…\nYour leverage comes only from the subsystem you personally own, not from the architecture and team around it.\n\nYou want clean, fully-connected environments and have no patience for physical, safety-critical systems.\n\nYou prefer inheriting an established autonomy stack over defining how it gets built.\n\nYou treat AI tooling as a curiosity rather than something worth building into how the team works.\n\nYour robotics experience is all startup-prototype, academic, or R&D work, with nothing shipped and run at commercial, production scale.\n\nCompensation\nBase 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.\nWork Authorization\nCandidates must have legal authorization to work in the United States without visa sponsorship. Bedrock does not sponsor employment visas.\nDue 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.\nBedrock Ocean Exploration is an equal opportunity employer.","description_format":"text","description_chars":8583,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Geological Survey","Underwater & Marine Robotics"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-06T10:29:16Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":23,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.501,"p_room":0.45,"age_days":67,"expected_fill_days":36,"reasons":["conf:0","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-10-25T05:49:26Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":235000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/bedrock-ocean-staff-robotics-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/bedrock-ocean-staff-robotics-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-25T20:37:38Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":29185,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-26T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":176571},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=176571"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fbedrock-ocean-staff-robotics-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fbedrock-ocean-staff-robotics-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fbedrock-ocean-staff-robotics-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/bedrock-ocean-staff-robotics-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fbedrock-ocean-staff-robotics-engineer"}]}