Embedded Systems & Controls Engineer

Embedded Systems & Controls Engineer at 7th Unit ABOUT 7TH UNIT 7th Unit is building a humanoid robot platform for the labor markets in Europe and Asia. We have signed LOIs from industrial operators and a clear 12-month milestone: a working robot operating inside a paying customer facility. We are not building toward a demo. We are building toward a deployed robot. This is one of four founding engineering roles. The team you join defines the architecture. The decisions made in the first 90 days will be in production in month ten. THE ROLE You own the gap between a policy that works in a demo and a robot that runs reliably for 20+ hours a day in a real customer facility. That means real-time motion control, actuator drivers, safety systems, latency-critical software, and the teleoperation fallback that keeps the system operational during the supervised pilot period. V1 is a wheeled upper-humanoid with dual arms executing defined intra-factory workflows. The environment is structured. The task set is constrained. Your job is to make the control architecture bulletproof enough to meet a 95% task completion rate and less than 5% human intervention rate after initial calibration — the thresholds our pilot customer has defined as the minimum for economic viability. WHAT YOU WILL OWN Real-time motion control: write the control software that runs on real hardware under real timing constraints for dual-arm manipulation and mobile base coordination Actuator integration: bring up motor drivers, force sensors, and joint controllers for the arm architecture the hardware team defines Safety systems: design the safety architecture that allows supervised autonomous operation in a real industrial environment with humans present Teleoperation fallback: build the remote operation capability that is operational from day one — the human-in-the-loop system that handles edge cases during the pilot First 90 days deliverable: a control system that reliably executes the pick-and-place and navigation workflow in a real environment with human supervision WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR 5+ years writing control software that runs on real robotic hardware under real timing and safety constraints Deep experience with motion control, actuator drivers, and real-time operating systems for physical robotic systems Background at a company where control systems shipped and operated in real environments: Boston Dynamics, Tesla Autopilot or Optimus, Waymo, Agility Robotics, Airbus, Boeing embedded systems, Lockheed, ABB Robotics, KUKA, or equivalent You know the difference between a controller that works in a demo and one that runs in production — and you have shipped the latter Experience designing human-in-the-loop fallback systems and safe autonomous operation around humans COMPENSATION & STRUCTURE Salary: $120,000+ (post-round close, market-rate for your location) Equity: Meaningful founding engineer equity, negotiated directly Structure: Founding engineer. You own the controls architecture. No legacy codebase to inherit — you write this from the ground up. Location: Remote during pre-deployment phase. Relocation to team hub as the build phase begins. WHY THIS, WHY NOW The robots at the well-funded companies are impressive in demos. The reason most of them are not in production at scale is controls — reliability, safety, and the ability to handle the real world. We are building in markets where deployment is the only thing that matters. We need someone for whom production reliability is the obsession.