Software Engineer, Robot Autonomy (Planning & Navigation)

At Laelaps AI, we believe robotics is entering a transformative decade, much like the arrival of the internet. Advances in AI, cloud computing, and hardware are reshaping what autonomous systems can do. Our mission is to build the intelligent software that powers physical security in the real world - enabling robots and sensors to handle dangerous and critical tasks that humans shouldn't have to. By engineering the orchestration layer for intelligent security, we aim to create a world that is safer, more secure, and more resilient.

We're a strong founding team based in Zurich, backed by visionary investors and advisors. We are engineering the future of security today!

As a Software Engineer on Robot Autonomy, you will make our robots navigate dependably across real customer sites. Our stack works. The gap between working and dependable is the whole job. Every new site tests how a robot understands its surroundings and chooses where to go: a ramp the planner avoids, a narrow passage that exposes a poor route, a gate that changes the map, a person who steps into the robot's path, or localization drift that builds over a long patrol. You treat those cases as the real navigation problem to solve, not as edge cases.

You'll shape the technical choices behind reliable navigation, from sensor selection, ground segmentation, and traversability estimation to predicting how people and vehicles move and planning safe, efficient routes around them. The system has to work day and night, in challenging weather, across different embodiments and changing site conditions. We measure success by whether the robot completes its patrol on a live site, not by how it performs in simulation.

Who We're Looking For

We're looking for an engineer who has taken a robotics system from unreliable to dependable and takes ownership beyond individual tickets. You can explain why you made a navigation design choice and what it costs. When a robot takes a bad route, you can tell whether the planner, the map, the state estimate, or the robot's behavior is at fault, and you fix the right one. You are comfortable in the field and want to understand how robots behave in real customer environments.

Your Background

• Experience with legged robots or with more than one robot embodiment.
• Experience with Nav2 or a comparable navigation framework.
• Motion prediction or planning among people and vehicles, such as trajectory forecasting or socially aware navigation.
• Terrain mapping and traversability methods: elevation mapping, learned traversability, or semantic segmentation for navigation.
• Experience with night-time or all-weather sensing, such as thermal cameras or LiDAR in rain and fog.
• Background in security, defence, or other safety-critical robotics deployments.

• Ownership: you are able to ship products and deliver project end-to-end.
• Mission: autonomous security that keeps people and critical sites safe, including in defence.
• Career path: a ground-floor seat with real runway. Prove your value and you will not have barriers to grow.
• Team: work directly with PhD-level co-founders in AI, Robotics, and Physics, alongside a strong (and fun) founding team.
• Compensation: Competitive equity/salary package
• Culture: International founding team that is serious about building but does not take itself too seriously.