SLAM & Navigation Engineer

About Omakase Robotics

Aming to be the world’s leading humanoid company, we are building highly reliable robots for everyday real-world use, engineered with rigorous mass-production discipline. Three vertically integrated components: Omakase D1 (our own hardware), Omakase Zen (the manipulation intelligence foundation), and Omakase OS (the orchestration software that runs robots in the field - this role).

About this Role

Our robots navigate hospitals, hotels, and retail floors - narrow corridors, glass walls, crowds, carts, and lighting that changes by the hour. You will own localization, mapping, and navigation inside Omakase OS: one engineer, full ownership, deployed robots. This role absorbs what was previously posted as two overlapping SLAM positions; we want one strong owner, not a SLAM department.

What You'll Do

• Own the localization/mapping stack end to end (we build on LiDAR-inertial odometry, e.g. FAST-LIO-class systems) for indoor human-shared environments
• Build robust state estimation: sensor fusion across LiDAR, cameras, IMU, and wheel odometry; degeneracy handling; relocalization
• Develop and tune path planning and obstacle avoidance for dynamic indoor spaces (people are not static obstacles)
• Build the mapping/calibration toolchain used at every customer-site deployment (fast site bring-up is a product feature)
• Optimize for edge compute (Jetson-class): CPU/GPU budgets shared with policy inference
• Validate in simulation and on robots; define navigation acceptance tests FDEs can run at deployment time

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years hands-on SLAM / VIO / LiDAR-inertial odometry experience with real sensor data on real platforms (research or production; simulation-only does not qualify)
• Production-grade modern C++ and solid Python
• Strong foundations in 3D geometry, state estimation (EKF/UKF, factor graphs), and nonlinear optimization
• ROS / ROS 2 on Linux; you have debugged bad odometry at a real site before
• Point cloud processing (PCL / Open3D) and multi-sensor calibration experience

Nice to Have

• FAST-LIO / LIO-SAM family internals; loop closure and map management at building scale
• Deployment on embedded GPUs (Jetson), CUDA optimization
• Navigation among dense pedestrians; social navigation literature awareness
• Docker, CI/CD; Japanese language is a plus for site visits

Why this role

• Full ownership of a stack that ships: your maps and planners run every day at customer sites, and deployment speed you build becomes company margin.
• You sit next to the manipulation and runtime teams - navigation is integrated, not siloed.