Robotics Application Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 28, 2026. First seen by Alion on Jun 19, 2026. Sunrise Robotics scores A on the Alion truth index.
Our Mission:
At Sunrise Robotics, we are dedicated to augmenting humanity through intelligent robotics. Our mission is to elevate the world of manufacturing by introducing intelligent, flexible robots that enhance human capabilities and existing machinery, ushering in the next era of production at higher quality, with less waste, and lower cost.
Our Vision:
We see a future where every element of manufacturing, from design to assembly, is optimised with intelligent automation. Our vision is to integrate flexible robotic solutions, based on generic hardware and advanced software/AI capabilities, into manufacturing, particularly in small and medium-sized enterprises, to make automation economically viable and accessible, for all sizes of manufacturers. We are not just building robots; we are creating the strategically crucial components for autonomous, intelligent agents of the future.
About the Role:
Sunrise Robotics builds automation that runs in real factories, on real production lines. This role is how that happens.
As a Robotics Application Engineer, you will take our platform's capabilities - perception, motion planning, manipulation - and build the applications that make a robotic cell do something tangible, useful, and production-ready for a customer. You decide how the pieces fit together. You define the test plan. You validate it works under pressure. You sign it off.
The work is technical and hands-on. You will be close to our robotics cells, close to the engineering teams building the platform, and close to the moment a cell goes live.
What You’ll Do:
Build robotic manipulation applications end-to-end - integrating perception, reasoning, and motion planning into a coherent system that fulfils defined customer requirements.
Define and execute test plans to verify application performance against customer KPIs; identify edge cases, recovery paths, and exception handling before anything reaches a production environment.
Deploy applications to real-world and simulated robotic systems, and own the technical delivery from initial design through to iterative improvement.
Perform A/B testing in production - deploy changes to a canary cell, compare performance against the baseline, and roll out with confidence.
Set up logging, observability, and alerting to track application health in the field; diagnose and address issues as they arise.
Log and track anomalies systematically, feeding findings back to improve robotic behaviours and applications over time.
Set up and maintain software for robot manipulators and grippers.
Support our Forward Deploy Engineering team before commissioning and when technical issues escalate beyond field resolution.
Contribute in steering the overall cell development product roadmap with your experience obtained developing real-world robotic applications.
What You’ll Need:
Hands-on experience implementing robotic manipulation systems in ROS2 across the full stack - perception, reasoning, and motion planning.
Strong software engineering skills in Python, with solid knowledge of Docker for building, deploying, and managing robotics software.
Experience deploying complex software systems to production and supporting them in the field.
Experience developing with behaviour trees, state machines, or similar orchestration components.
The ability to design test plans, define edge cases, and verify system performance across multiple KPIs.
Strong troubleshooting and debugging skills across systems that span both software and hardware.
Clear written and verbal communication - able to explain technical decisions concisely to people across engineering, AI, and customer-facing teams.
What Makes You Stand Out:
Experience with perception, AI deployment, or machine vision systems.
Experience working with ABB robots
Familiarity with NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Omniverse, or similar simulation platforms.
A master's degree in robotics, software engineering, or a related field - or equivalent practical experience.
Why Us:
We're building flexible robotic automation that runs in live manufacturing environments across Europe - and this role sits at the point where the platform becomes a product.
Direct impact: When a cell hits its throughput targets on a customer's production floor, that's your work. The connection between what you build and what happens in the real world is short and visible.
Technical depth with real constraints: You're working with a capable platform and genuine customer requirements, and the challenge is making them meet in a way that scales.
Cross-functional exposure: You'll work across R&D, AI, and Forward Deploy - with a clear view of the full pipeline from capability development to customer delivery.
Room to grow: As the tooling matures and the platform evolves, so does this role. The engineers who build strong foundations here will have real options for where they take their careers next.